Shekhinah
by Fixomnia Scribble
Summary: In the Hebrew mystical tradition, the Shekhinah is the dwelling-place of the Divine, the moment of dawn wisdom.  This is the story of Sara and Grissom, as they grew up and changed each others' worlds.  "M" for family abuse and later adult chapters.
1. Gilbert Learns to Read

**_Introduction_**

In the Hebrew mystical tradition, the Shekhinah is the dwelling-place of the Divine. It is considered by scholars to be a literal, physical presence that cannot be contained or described. It is said that when two or more are joined in prayer or divine purpose, the Shekhinah exists in the space between them. The early Vedas of Hinduism call this Agni, the primal leaping spark that powers the cosmos and brings heat, light and enlightenment. Science has many names for the Shekhinah, from weak and strong nuclear forces to quantum superstring vibrations. Poets call it mystical force of nature known as love.

The reason that Chapters 14 and 15 have been included at this stage is that they were the first ones to be written, for a challenge. Like a kaleidoscope, formed the shape of previous and future chapters, and lo, a novel was conceived. Read them now or wait until the chapters have caught up, just as you like.

That said, this was an albatross to write, and is still being written. It's the story of Grissom and Sara as they grew up, met, and changed each others' worlds. It's a tribute to several case histories of children who lived through unimaginable childhoods to become healthy, happy adults, and in some cases parents with healthy, happy kids of their own. It's also been an intense journey through the eyes of two characters I adore and admire, who had so many stories left untold...and an exercise in letting smut off my hard drive for the first time. A triple whammy.

There may be triggers in this story for those with memories of childhood domestic or sexual abuse. They'll be labelled in the chapter summaries. The last thing I want to do is spark a PTSD episode in anyone, although it's worth noting that the point of the whole novel is that recovery, while sometimes hellish, is absolutely worth every re-lived moment or setback.

As this is as much as a journey for me as the characters themselves, there may be chapter notes along the way. A sort of double-journal process, if you will. I'm blown away by the comments and conversations this story has sparked: never doubt that you are part of that process as well. As Edmund Locard so aptly stated, any interaction leaves some trace evidence behind on both elements. And the quantum physicists add: each thing is changed by the observation thereof.

Enjoy - and go hug the ones you love.

**_Addendum:_**

If this story should seem familiar to you, it was posted to several years ago, under a different handle. It still exists, with illustrations and linked-up table of contents, in its original livejournal site, sonnet_47(dot)livejournal(dot)com, as well as several other archives. It hasn't been pirated: it's only me!

Scribble on, maniacs.

Vancouver, BC  
>October 2011<p>

* * *

><p>Chapter One:<br>**Gilbert Learns to Read  
><strong>

* * *

><p><strong><em>A lesson.<em>**

"Daddy, what's that?"

"Where are you pointing? Oh, Ceanothus. Common name, Frosty Blue Mountain Lilac. It's a young one, not even as tall as you. By next year, it'll be six inches taller."

"So will I."

"So you will. Can you say the Latin? _Ceanothus_."

"See an othus," Gilbert obliged, without a trace of baby lisp.

"Good lad."

Arthur ruffled the boy's summer-streaked curls, and smiled down at him, more than a little relieved. It was only recently that Gilbert had felt comfortable enough, walking through the University's Botanical Garden, to speak and ask questions. Frances had been right, as usual. The child was just shy, and needed to feel at home in his surroundings before opening up.

As a three-year-old college brat in a small faculty, Gilbert hadn't had the company of many children his own age to play with. He was used to being treated as a adult by his parents and their colleagues. An energetic only child, he thrived upon the constant interaction with his Professor-Gardener father and his mother, an artist, both of whom kept him busy from sunup to bedtime with games and lessons and conversation. Most other children bored him or looked askance at him, and adults spoke to him as if he were an infant. It wasn't surprising that the child squirmed silently in strange surroundings.

"Do you like it here?" Arthur asked, as they walked down the sunny path between well-spaced towering evergreens and shady fruit-bearing trees in the Botany school's experimental grove. There was no need to hold his hand. Gilbert had always resisted it, and had promised instead to remain close by.

"Yes."

A typical Gilbertian reply. Arthur continued: "What do you like best about it?"

Gilbert stopped and considered the question, tilting his head slightly and fingering his chin, just as Arthur did when faced with a poser. He screwed up his little face in thought.

"It's very quiet. And everything stays where it's supposed to."

"Well, trees grow so slowly we can't see it, but to our eyes, their roots keep them still in the ground. Only their leaves and branches move in the wind."

"Yes. So you always know where to find them. You could come back again and again and again, and they would still be there."

"Mostly right. Unless they had been moved, or had fallen in a storm. And if you came back in a hundred years, some of them might have grown old and fallen down."

"Daddy, if we come here in a hundred years, will we see the same trees?"

"Oh, not many of us live that long. But I think you can count on seeing these trees for a good sixty or seventy years, and some will outlive many generations after us. Like that Douglas Fir there. See him?"

"That's _big_."

"It takes three grown men to be able to hold hands around him. He's probably four or five hundred years old. He started growing hundreds of years before anyone thought of putting a University here."

Gilbert stopped. "How do you know?" he asked, his blue eyes, so like his fathers', flown wide.

"We know because people have written about it, and have taken pictures, but mostly because we know how to read the ages of trees."

"How do you do that?"

Dr. Arthur Grissom slipped easily back in to professorial mode.

"How about you come and see for yourself?"

Gilbert grinned and nodded vigorously. Arthur grinned back.

He took Gilbert into the long greenhouse-laboratory, steamy and verdant under the Californian September afternoon, and they counted rings on sample cross-sections, and measured saplings with brass calipers.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Teatime.<em>**

"Gib darling, would you take Mrs. Meaks her tea?"

Mama handed him one of the good sets, pure white bone china, gold-brushed, with blue Delphiniums painted on the saucer's rim. Gilbert took it from her in two hands, and turned to Mrs. Meaks, sitting in her chair on the other side of the thick Turkish rug from his mother, in the small front room.

With his eyes firmly fixed on the cup's brimming contents, he enjoyed the slight dizzying effect of the Turkish carpet pattern passing under his feet. The steaming, fragrant cup became the still point around which everything else moved. Mrs. Meaks was no more than a fuzzy yellow blur, and the other chattering ladies in the circle ceased to exist. Even the colours of the room seemed to thin into mistiness.

He stood still for a moment, and watched the tea in the eggshell-thin cup slosh and settle. How strange that _something he carried_ would need _more time_ to catch up with his stopping.

He was tempted to let go of the saucer and see if it would remain still in the air for a moment, in the opposite fashion of the tea needing time to stop moving, but he'd already done that once before and been scolded. He wasn't sure if he'd done something wrong, or done something naughty, but he knew better than to try again in front of his mother's friends.

He walked the last few paces.

"What a careful boy," Mrs. Meaks beamed as Gilbert arrived at her knee. "You didn't spill a drop. How old are you now, dear?"

Gilbert stood in front of her, as she sipped her tea, and regarded her silently.

"Gibbie?" Mama prompted. "Answer Mrs. Meaks."

He shivered with a sudden cold, and his tummy felt funny. He turned to look at Mama for a moment, and then back to Mrs. Meaks. Mrs. Meaks was all right, when she spoke to him alone, but when they were all sitting together, all the ladies, her voice turned high and silly, the way that some people talked to animals. He didn't like it. People's voices shouldn't change with each person they talked to. Even Mama's voice, usually calm and clear, sounded like a lady on the television during these tea afternoons.

By way of compromise, he held up three fingers, and cringed at the delighted chuckles from around the room.

He returned to his mother, and whispered in her ear, "Mama, they're all looking at me."

"Pardon, dear?"

"Can I go?"

"Oh, of course. Daddy's outside in the back yard with the gentlemen, or you could play in your room for a while."

Outside was exactly what he needed. It was getting hard to breathe. He nodded and trotted towards the doorway to the kitchen.

"Oh, Frannie, he's outgrowing you!" Mrs. Schumacher warned as he left, "Seeking out the company of the menfolk already."

"That's the time to plant cabbages..." Mrs. Rowley returned slyly.

The front room dissolved in laughter. Gilbert was already in the kitchen, and didn't see his mother carefully turn her head from side to side to listen, as the cacophony rang in her remaining good ear.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Painting.<em>**

"Mama, I'm hungry. Is it dinner yet?"

Frances set down her brush and pushed back the cuff of her smock to look at her watch. "Oh, Gibbie, I'm sorry. Yes, it's almost dinner time. What have you and Daddy been doing?"

"Digging."

"Really? And you so tidy! Have you washed already?"

Gilbert nodded, and pointed to her hands, wrinkling his nose.

Frances grinned and held up her hands. "Just these. That's why I always wear my smock, so the rest of me stays clean. What does it make you think of, this one?"

Gilbert had come to his mother's side and was considering the canvas on the standing easel. She had worked a series of dark sepia curves, stark edges against an autumn-gold background, like a rapid blinking glance at dancer's limbs in some modern choreography. Like most of her favourites, it had begun as an experiment, a little twist to a familiar opening exercise, and had taken an exciting turn. She must have been engrossed since coming upstairs after lunch, when Artie had kissed the back of her neck as she did the dishes, and said he could tell when she had an idea, and took over for her.

"What's that?"

"It's an idea. Not a real thing you can hold, but a picture of what an idea feels like. To me."

"No, I mean...the stuff."

"Oh, it's a new kind of paint. It's called acrylic. It's very colourful, isn't it? It's so different from watercolours." she gestured to a series of small, delicate still-lifes and landscapes lined up on the white shelves.

"It stays where you put it."

"How do you mean? You mean it comes in bottles instead of tubes?"

"No, on the canvas. It doesn't move and get lost. The other stuff does."

"You're right. Watercolour moves so quickly, and that's why a lot of people like it. You have to know how it works, and it's a skill to learn. You've seen me do all kinds of things to make it go where I want it to, haven't you?"

He had, from before his earliest memories. Mama mixing colours on her palette, adding small amounts of water, using masque or salt or blowing on wet edges to fix them. Sometimes she'd sit in the sun in the hottest part of the day, working quickly as the pigments dried in translucent layers almost as fast as she painted. Sometimes she let the colours drip and run into each other, studying them, learning how to make them bend to her will.

"I like this better," Gilbert pronounced, pointing at the acrylic piece. "It just stays there. It doesn't move around."

"You know," Frances said, spreading her arm to invite him onto her knee, "It's not so scary when things move around and get mixed up. It just takes time to get to know where they're going, and how they get there. You want to try?"

Gilbert shook his head, and then, shyly, nodded, climbing up.

"Just a little one, before dinner, then." She swiveled them around on her stool to a smaller table easel, which held a practice piece of rag paper already stretched and taped to a glass pane.

"What colour?"

He pointed to the Cadmium Blue wash.

"All right. Here we go." She took his hand and helped him dip and swirl the brush, and then trail it across the paper.

"It's dripping!"

"That's okay. Just watch where it goes. Now try red, quick-quick, before all the blue runs away. That's it, right underneath so it touches. See how they mix where they run together? See, as long as that's what you want it to do, that's exactly how you do it. If I wanted the red and the blue not to run together, I'd paint a line here - " she drew another red stroke, leaving a narrow dry strip below the blue, "- I'd do that. That's how it stays apart. Watercolour is a kind of paint that works best when you build it up in layers, so you have to know how each one works."

"That's hard," Gilbert wrinkled his nose again. Frances laughed.

"Yes, but give it time. You'll find it's worth it."

"Real things don't get mixed up," Gilbert said, somewhat witheringly.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Focus.<em>**

"For an _hour_?"

"I was watching him the whole time. He came to no harm."

"No, I believe you, but Artie, what three year old sits still that long, and lets himself get cold and cramped like that?"

"He was watching a colony of woodlice under one of the flagstones. I've spent hours watching things like that myself. And you know what it's like when you're lost in a painting. It's only natural."

"Yes, but...there's something...the way he doesn't even notice anything else when he's fixated. At least we know for certain it's not his hearing." she shook her head, making an effort not to let the sudden wave of misery show. Arthur was too good to her, his support unwavering, but if he knew how deep the worm of terror had gone...what if it should all become too much? What if Gilbert, too, became deaf? What if their son wasn't all right?

Arthur put his hands on her shoulders. "Darling, what's worrying you?"

"It's not just this. It's so many little things. We know he's a gifted child, but that often comes with a price. There's his shyness, that way he has of looking right through people, the way he talks when he finally does speak. And the mischief he gets into, it's not normal little-boy games. It's as if he gets a question in his head, and he can't think of anything else until it's settled. He's three."

Frances finally spoke the words they had both known for some time: "God knows I should be grateful for such a healthy, well-mannered and gifted son, but gifted or not, _Gilbert's not like other boys_."

* * *

><p><strong><em>Dr. Hunt.<em>**

"Mrs. Grissom, I can assure you Gilbert's behaviour does not arise from any medical or psychiatric process. Children, you see - especially bright fellows like Gilbert - children only reflect what they see around him. Whether you recognize it or not, or whether you care to admit it at this time, your concerns about your hearing, and your ability to communicate, have transferred to your son. No doubt you have already begun to communicate non-verbally in your own home, which is what Gilbert has taken to doing. Probably you have also some doubts about your ability to be a good wife and mother, if your hearing loss continues, which, you can imagine, would be impossible for a child to know how to react to."

Dr. Hunt leaned forward earnestly and continued: "Gilbert's a fine healthy child. You must be honest with yourself about your condition, and bring your family into your considerations. They will still need you, even if your hearing loss does become complete and permanent. You can still be a success as a wife and mother. Probably you are such a good manager, Mrs. Grissom, that they don't feel able to voice their concerns to you." He nodded, "That's it, of course. In your going on as though nothing is the matter, you have - without intent - _shut them down_ from communicating about it, or with you."

Frances stared back at the young doctor, and gathered her camel coat more firmly around her.

"Doctor, how many children like Gilbert have you seen? Gifted children, who behave and speak as he does, who are inordinately sensitive and appear so focussed as to lose themselves in their thoughts."

"Now, Mrs. Grissom, I gather you are quite a talented artist yourself, but I'd beware of projecting your own artistic temperament onto your son. Allowing him to wallow in his feelings won't help him learn to articulate them. In answer to your question, I've met many bright children, and often they spend too much time thinking and not enough time being active, and playing with other children. He's a little young for baseball or soccer, or I should suggest he go in for sports. Perhaps his father can take him to the park more often. Give him time, and try to be open with your family about what you are going through. They will follow your example, and learn that it's all right to speak about it."

Hunt turned back to his desk, and scribbled on a writing tablet. "I don't want you to think I'm ignoring how terribly difficult this must be for you. I'm referring Gilbert to a Pediatric Development specialist in Los Angeles. He'll have seen many more children than I, and probably a few families in situations like yours. If there any answers I don't have, you can be sure Dr. O'Malley will have them."

Frances got up, keenly aware that the slightest expression of frustration or distaste would be communicated to O'Malley in advance of any appointment.

"Thank you, Dr. Hunt. I'm sure this must all seem like a silly waste of energy, but we are researching every avenue. We want only the best for Gilbert and our family."

"I'm sure you do, Mrs. Grissom, and you are doing a commendable job. I'll telephone as soon as I have your new X-ray results."

* * *

><p><strong><em>Dr. O'Malley.<em>**

"...and in the absence of _proper _mothering, the child becomes confused and distressed. I understand your wife, very clever woman by the way, is under a great deal of stress in regards to her own medical condition."

"Doctor, I assure you, Frances is an excellent mother, and Gilbert adores her. She's his constant companion during the day."

"Yes, I see that," O'Malley nodded and glanced down at his notes, spread out on the green leather desk. "She spends copious amounts of time teaching him, and encouraging him in his observations of the plants you grow at home. She also believes that he quickly grows bored, and will get up to mischief, if not stimulated intellectually at all times."

"Yes. He's a very bright child, and we intend to have him assessed once he is of an age to be tested, but in the meantime, he's more than capable of absorbing simple lessons. He's fairly desperate to read and write, and he's adding and subtracting in his head."

Arthur leaned forward and accepted a cigarette from the doctor's silver case. He lit it and sat back, waiting for O'Malley to do the same.

O'Malley nodded and blew a polite cloud of smoke to the side. "And it is just that sort of anxiety that I refer to now. Let us examine his daily emotional environment: the person with whom he spends the most time is under a great deal of pressure, and has doubts about her ability to communicate in future. She feels a certain urgency to transmit as much as possible to the child while she may. The child feels this expectation, and struggles to meet it, causing the very sort of anxiety symptoms you describe. In doing so, the two have formed a teacher-pupil relationship, that is far from the accepting, motherly atmosphere needed for the very young child to develop a proper sense of self-worth."

"Really, sir, I think Frances has her hands full to keep him from being too full of himself. He was like a self-sufficient little man from the beginning. If it weren't that we see his social awkwardness and his tendency to block out the world increasing rather than decreasing, we shouldn't be worried at all. In many ways he's a model child."

"As one would expect the son of a professor to be. Nevertheless, do you agree that Mrs. Grissom and Gilbert might both benefit from a change of company once in a while? I think it would be worthwhile to see whether increased playtime with other children, or perhaps even an afternoon a week under the care of neighbour's wife, might help them both."

"Actually, Frances plans to begin taking sign-language classes soon, and we are looking around for regular afternoon care already."

"That sounds like a good idea. I think you'll find that as Mrs. Grissom comes to terms with her own sad condition, that Gilbert will respond in kind."

Arthur took a slow inhale of his cigarette, and tried to look impassive. _Why must every consultation about Gilbert come back to Frances? _Was it merely a popular professional backlash against Dr. Jung's anti-Freudian break? Really, this O'Malley character was no different from the rest of them.

"Doctor, you realize that we don't think there's anything _wrong _with Gilbert - we are only concerned that he's, well, an odd little fellow, and if there are any ways we can help him fit in a little better with people, we want to find them, and before he starts school."

"Behaviour," O'Malley sat back and puffed contentedly, "is largely a matter of good parental conditioning. It's obvious Gilbert knows that you both love him very much, and seeks to please you. That's a better place to start than many parents come to me with. Let him know you expect him to just be happy, and that he needn't seek to impress you - and slow him down a little. He'll find it even harder if he's so far ahead of the other children when he begins school."

* * *

><p><strong><em>Dragonflies.<em>**

The dragonfly danced in the autumn breeze, and Gilbert danced with it. Not seeking to capture, but to be part of the dipping and swirling, the darkly glittering colours that leapt and plunged.

Beside him, Emilia Suarez' four year old daughter Melinda danced too, laughing and trying to keep up.

"You're too good at this!" she said, "How do you always know where he's going to go?"

"I just do!" said Gilbert, jumping up onto a wooden seat at the bottom of the garden, "Look, there he goes."

The dragonfly soared upwards and over the trees on an updraft. The two children flopped onto the garden seat, giggling and breathless, until two more dragonflies skimmed past. Melinda grabbed his hand and pulled him up again, and Frances noticed that Gilbert let her lead him up and down the garden for a minute or more before pulling away.

"_Libélula_!" cried Melinda.

"Dragonfly!" yelled Gilbert.

Watching the children from the wraparound porch, Frances and Emilia shared a smile.

"They'll be just fine," Emilia said, "Good for Melinda to have a little brother to practice, because - " she folded her hands in a brief but fervent prayer and grinned broadly.

Though the words sounded tinny and distant, Frances easily caught their meaning, and nodded. "I'm sure you're right," she said, "And you really don't mind having him here Tuesdays and Thursdays?"

"No, no problem. He's a good boy, your Gibbie. He's welcome, at least until 'Linda starts school, and that's a year or more. Plenty of time," Emilia replied, patting Frances' arm. "It'll all come right, you'll see. The Holy Virgin and her Son won't let you down. Didn't you say you could hear a little better last week?"

And this, thought Frances, was one of the hardest parts of a slow but growing disability: having to take hope away from others, especially those who sought only to help and be a comfort.

"It comes and goes," she said. "What's that saying? 'Pray to God, sailor, but row for the shore'."

"That's good," Emilia nodded approvingly. She hesitated, and went on, "You know, Frannie, don't mind my saying, but you can't let no chit-chat-chit-chat bother you. Anyone who knows you and Gibbie knows better. The rest of them - ffft!" she made a dismissive gesture.

Which certainly confirmed a few lingering suspicions, not the least of which was the gradual but firm separation of a few neighbourly connections, and one blatant show of embarrassed haste by a local mother who tugged her son along when he waved at Gilbert from across the street, on the way home from shopping.

_"Mama, why did she do that?" Gilbert had asked. "Is she angry? That didn't look like an angry face."_

_"I don't know, dear," Frances had replied, "Sometimes grownups have a lot to think about, and they don't notice some of the little things they do."_

_"Even you?"_

_"Oh, yes."_

_"And Daddy?"_

_"All of us, darling," Frances smiled down at her son, and wished fervently that it was as easy to explain Gilbert to the world as it was to explain the world to Gilbert._

_"That wasn't an angry face," Gilbert went on. "It was a sorry face. Did she do something wrong?"_

_"Let's hurry and see if we can finish dinner by the time Daddy comes home."_

"Emilia, I'm so glad you're here." said Frances.

"Don't you worry," Emilia said staunchly. "And don't you listen to no stupid people with mean ideas."

Frances found this unwontedly hilarious. "I guess that's a mercy," she sputtered into her handkerchief, and Emilia, eyes dancing, covered her mouth and blushed brightly before joining in.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Sign Language.<em>**

"Daddy?"

"Mm hmm?"

"Why is Mama sad at me?"

_Why indeed_, thought Arthur. "Did Mama seem sad today?"

"Yes. She didn't hear me so I had to shout - and I'm not s'pposed to shout - but she didn't look angry. She looked sad."

Arthur set his book on the side table by the easy chair. Gilbert climbed into Arthur's lap and sat crosswise, looking earnestly into his father's face. It was their favourite way to have serious conversations.

"Well, you know Mama's left ear doesn't work at all anymore. And her right ear is getting worse. That would be hard for either of us to manage, don't you think?"

"Yes." Gilbert nodded. "But I'm not s'pposed to shout, right?"

If only the true impact of incipient total deafness were so simple as that, Arthur thought. Ignorant neighbours and ridiculous doctors and their need for gossip and finger-pointing blame notwithstanding. What about music - all the fast-moving, exhilarating conversations - listening to the ocean on picnic days, the rich liturgy and organ music of Sunday Mass, and the wind in the trees - even his and Gilbert's voices...

Thank God Frances had a few stalwart friends of her own, and her art to sustain her, emotionally and, increasingly, financially.

He hugged the child, and for once, Gilbert didn't squirm away, but hugged him back.

"We're going to have a lot of things to learn, you and I. Do you think we can help Mama learn to cope?"

Gilbert was curious. "How?"

"You know when you go to Mrs. Suarez' house, that's when Mama takes lessons in sign language? Like this?" he slowly spelled out 'A-R-T-H-U-R'. Gilbert nodded. "Well, that's a new way of talking that we're both going to learn, so we can talk to Mama, or anyone else who is deaf. With our hands and faces. Mama's going to carry around a pad of paper and a pencil in her purse, so she can write notes to people, but there will be times when you can sign to her quickly about things she needs to know."

"What things?"

"Well, if there's someone at the door. Or if someone's trying to call her from across a room or at the store. Mama can still hear a very little, but not enough to hear faraway or quiet things."

"I'm going to have to work on my writing," said Gilbert, frowning, and sounding so like his father that Arthur laughed.

"All in good time, son. But I can write down something for you to copy out whenever you think Mama needs to see it."

"What is it?"

"First let me show you the sign. Make a fist. Yes, just like that. Then straighten out your thumb, and then your pointer finger, and your little finger. There. Can you guess what it means?"

Gilbert looked at his hand, and then back up, shaking his head.

"It means, 'I love you'."

"Really?"

"Yep. See, there's the 'I', and the 'L' for love, and when you show it to her, that's the 'you' part. I bet Mama will need us both to tell her that a lot. Want me to write it down for you?"

"Yes!"

Arthur pulled open the drawer of the side table and picked out a small telephone pad. "You keep this in your room, and show her this when you think she needs it."

Gilbert nodded.

Arthur put his pen into Gilbert's hand, and guiding the child's fingers, wrote on the pad and spoke aloud: "I LOVE YOU".

Gilbert stared at it. "I know almost all of those!"

"I bet you do. And now you know what they say when you put them together like that."

"Can I go show her now?"

"Of course. Let's both go." he hoisted the child off his lap.

The Grissom men, big and small, walked to the kitchen, where Frances was putting the finishing touches on a roast chicken dinner. She turned around as she felt their footsteps and smiled.

"What are you two planning?" she asked, "You look like you've been up to no good."

"Mama, we want to tell you - "

It dawned on Gilbert that Mama was still smiling, but looking hard at his mouth, as he spoke. It was his first inkling that this was just the beginning of some major changes to their world.

He held up his hand and made the sign, just as Daddy had shown him, and then held up the pad. He looked over at his father to make sure he was doing it right, and so he was spared the complex jumble of emotions that flitted across his mother's face.

As it was, he only saw her laughing as she came and wrapped her arms around them both.


	2. Fine Works of Art

Chapter Two:  
><strong>Fine Works of Art<strong>

* * *

><p><strong><em>Bad days.<em>**

The first one he could remember, he was five years old.

He woke up with the sun, as little boys do, and the world was all wrong. He could hear everything. His breathing, his heart pounding, his mother's footsteps coming up the stairs, a car several blocks away - everything was too loud, ringing in his ears. It hurt to open his eyes because everything was too bright, too garish, jumbled beyond reason and somehow filled with menace.

Worst of all was the realization that his mother was in his room and trying to talk to him, and he couldn't answer her. He couldn't look at her face, only the neutral swishing skirt of her dress. If he looked at her face she might turn into something..._something else_.

He pulled his quilt up over his head and wanted to cry, but he must never do that, because he must never show it.

"Are you sick, dear?" his mother asked, out loud. He wanted to say something, but he felt sick to his stomach just thinking about speaking. He only managed a horrible whimper that made him feel more miserable.

"Oh, Gibbie," his mother said. "Don't worry, dear. I'll ask Emilia to call Dr. Hunt."

He curled up and slept again, a deep, disturbed slumber filled with lurking dangerous things and twisted familiar faces that he couldn't quite recognize. He didn't remember waking up, but slowly realized that one of the voices was speaking clearly, steadily and gently. He held onto the voice and let it tow him to shore.

"Nightmares and waking terrors," Dr. Hunt said comfortingly, sitting beside his bed. "Scary enough to see, when they first appear, and it's usually around this age. Gilbert's a bright, sensitive child, and he's likely having a time of it adjusting to school. He's lived a quiet life until now. No offense, Mrs. Grissom. I'm speaking only of the fact of sound itself, and your house is an oasis of peace, if I may say so." He turned to Gilbert, whose eyes were still glassy, in an ashen little face peeking out from the sheets. "Eh, son? We know you're a special case, all right, but don't you worry."

As Dr. Hunt and his mother left him alone and walked away, Gil caught some words, spoken very quietly, "_...in good shape...just overwrought..._"

At least, he thought, Dr. Hunt knew he could talk almost silently to his mother, and she'd be able to follow most of what he said. Not like Dr. O'Malley.

O'Malley. There was no doubt another appointment would soon be made.

He slept again, feeling odd and out of sorts with the midday sun in his room.

When he awoke, hours later, he was surprised how good he felt. Sort of rinsed-out and hollow, pleasantly hungry, and both floppy and energetic at once. He sat up cautiously and looked around. The room looked as it always did. He must have been sick, or something, to think that it had turned into a dangerous place he had to hide from.

He padded downstairs in his pyjamas, and found his mother sitting in the living room reading from one of the encyclopedia volumes from the big bookshelf. It was rude to sneak up on her, so he stomped on the floor twice so she would know he was nearby.

She looked up, and her brow smoothed as she smiled at him.

/How are you feeling, Gibbie?/ she signed.

/I'm better. I'm hungry. What time is it?/ he signed back carefully.

/Nearly four. You want some soup and crackers?/

He nodded. /What's that?/ he asked, pointing to a bottle on the side table and raising a shoulder.

/Medicine, from Dr. Hunt. To help you relax and go to sleep, if it happens again./

/Again?/

/Just in case./

Later on, he wandered through the living room, and curiously examined the page his mother had been reading.

_Ep-il-ep-sy? What's that?_

"You can't let the child control you, Mother," said Dr. O'Malley, a week later in his overwarm Los Angeles office, overlooking the busy street below. "He's only trying to find his limits with authority - now that he's actually under some authority at school. Smart children need firmer correction. You won't do him any favours by not teaching him how to control himself."

He spoke, as usual as if Gilbert were not sitting beside Frances, though the child had no choice but to try to fingerspell by sound some words that went by too quickly for her to lip-read. Sometimes he had to speak for her. The doctor had never offered to communicate by writing, and Frances, who abhorred fuss or special treatment, would not ask either of them to do so.

They weren't learning anything new, and O'Malley only seemed to want to blame his mother for everything. He'd even hinted that without the X-rays that proved her otosclerosis was real, and still developing, he would have assumed it was an hysterical condition.

Gilbert never told his mother what it was like, feeling thrust on stage and occasionally obliged to perform in front of this mean, wrong person, who was supposed to be the wisest man in the county when it came to children.

The bad days repeated themselves every couple of months. Each time, he felt his parents' fear and desperate need to help him, and came back to the world feeling horribly guilty. He didn't want the bad days to happen, and he tried to explain that he really did like school, where he had friends and hundreds of things to learn about.

"But what does it feel like, old man?" asked his father, "Feelings, I mean. What do you feel, the night before a bad day?"

They were trying to get inside him again, and nothing he could say would convince them that he was really, truly happy. He wasn't trying to get out of school, and he wasn't being bullied or bored. "It's just - I can hear the whole world. Everything's too much. I just have to go away and everything hurts to look at or even smell. Sometimes there's flashing lights, like in water."

"Does it make your head hurt?" Dr. Grissom asked. Gilbert shook his head.

"But Daddy," he whispered, "That last time, I couldn't think in words. I couldn't _talk_. I couldn't remember how. It was scary. Daddy, what does that? What happened? Is it what happened to Mommy?"

"I don't know, son. It's not the same as Mommy's hearing at all. But we're going to find out."

The bad days made little difference to his school life, since he was already far in advance of most of his lessons and caught up easily with the rest. His first grade teacher frowned at first and didn't believe him when he tried to explain, but eventually she just took it as a part of Gilbert being Gilbert.

The worst part was the oppressive, swirling dreamworld that sucked him under, a few hours after the first realization that everything was becoming too intense to bear. Sometimes he dreamed so clearly that he could not distinguish dream from reality, and sometimes even his dreams rushed by too quickly to grasp. Always he felt a creeping menace, as though horrors lurked behind every familiar thing.

Always, after sleeping all day long, he woke feeling strangely better than before, and very shamefaced about the whole thing.

"It's not as though he's an epileptic or a particularly nervous child," Hunt said, "And not autistic, though he does exhibit some related tendencies, as you've noted. But we all know he's extremely interested in the world and people around him. If these aren't panic attacks, then we need to look for physical factors."

Even at seven years old, Gilbert could have told him he wouldn't find any.

They finally stopped seeing Dr. O'Malley when Gilbert was eight years old, after O'Malley raised his voice to Frances, and said that in his opinion, Gilbert ought to be sent away to boarding-school, away from his passive father and his neurotic mother who insisted on projecting all her own rage and fear onto her child, despite all reasonable efforts to convince her otherwise.

Gilbert, who had been doing his best to translate the doctor's rapid-fire tirade into sign language, let his hands drop and stared at the doctor.

"You're wrong," Frances told O'Malley, coldly and clearly. "You haven't listened to anything we've said, and you certainly haven't done my family any good."

They left, and went for a long walk on the Fisherman's Wharf and had milkshakes together.

/Gibbie, of all the works of art I've created, you are the one I'm most proud of./

/I know I'm _different_, Mom. You don't have to try and make me feel special./

/You're both different and special, and I'm incredibly proud of you. I'm not talking down to you. We're just going to have to figure out what's best for you, as a family./

Frances and Arthur were careful never to let Gilbert learn anything of the meeting that took place between Arthur and O'Malley the following day.

Over the next year, the bad days grew less frequent, but they began to come with such blinding pain behind his eyes that he could only curl up under his covers and moan, praying and wishing for it to stop.

In third grade, Dr. Hunt finally suggested "migraine". Much reading was done, and the family heaved a huge sigh of relief. There it was, laid out symptom by symptom. Right down to aphasia, optical neuralgia and euphoria.

Gilbert felt an incredible weight rise up off his back. There was a word for it? Other people had days like this?

Not often as bad as Gilbert's, and very unusual in young children, Dr. Hunt told him, but a common enough affliction that they could all stop worrying.

"You had us fooled, young man," Dr. Hunt clapped a friendly hand on Gilbert's shoulder. "Ironically, if you hadn't started having those awful pains along with the attacks, we might have missed it. I was becoming certain I'd misdiagnosed epilepsy or something."

He sent them away with a copied-out list of common foods that could trigger a migraine, and they went home, freed of a great terror.

They could learn to make friends with this beast. They had done so before.

* * *

><p><strong><em>School.<em>**

"Has the queen begun laying yet?"

"No, but she's been acting funny. I think maybe she's getting ready."

They bent over the wood-framed ant farm, Gilbert and his father, in the greenhouse that was built along the backyard wall of the house. It had begun almost by accident: Dr. Grissom had mentioned that the early crop of zucchini was particularly beset by black ants that year. Rather than spray them with insecticide, Gilbert suggested, could he try to draw them off with something more attractive, like his father's friend Dr. Daly had done with the starlings in the University garden?

Arthur was extremely pleased, in his quiet way, and Gil had overheard him say to his mother that if she still wanted to make an artist out of him, she'd better work fast, because it was clear they had a scientist on their hands. His mother had laughed aloud, something she only did around Gil and his father these days. Gilbert hadn't seen her nimble signed response, but he guessed from his father's chuckle that his mother didn't think he'd grow up to be an artist, either.

So they had built a fine glass-fronted ant-farm together, over a rainy weekend in late May. Gilbert had experimented with different kinds of leaves and over-ripe fruit and honey, until the ants had found it and made new trails to tell each other where it was. His father told him that the experiment was working well: the June crop was larger and much less infested. They compared observational notes as fellow scientists, not only with each other but with Dr. Daly, when he visited.

"Winning Science Fair material, I should think," said Dr. Daly. "Have you been taking photographs?"

Gilbert had, and encouraged, he began organizing them into a proper scrapbook with written headings.

As the summer heat grew and the ants began to spend more time seeking the earthen floor of the greenhouse instead of the tasty growing plants on the benches, Gilbert nailed a little piece of wood over the open gap in the edge of the ant-farm to keep them all inside until winter, and set it in the shadiest spot under a work bench by the wall.

Now the sleepy heat of summer was upon them. Gilbert and his father worked in the greenhouse only in the early mornings and the evenings, and the thirsty vegetables sucked up all the water they sprayed over them before bedtime.

"She's a beauty, that one," Arthur said admiringly, of the queen. "Did you know she'd taken up official residence in the farm?"

"Not until they made her chamber big enough to see," Gilbert replied. "I don't think she's left there all week. She's too big. The others must be bringing her food."

"That what they do," Arthur agreed. "Well, we'll check again in the morning."

They set the farm back under the bench, and went back into the house with a bag of freshly picked zucchini, green onions, tomatoes, fingerling cucumbers and baby lettuces.

"I have to tell you," his mother said at dinnertime that night, her hands flashing beneath her chin as she spoke aloud, "After Confession last week, I mentioned to Father Stewart that sometimes I wondered if it was a real sin or just a human habit to feel more grateful to my family than to God sometimes for providing such good food. He said I would have to bring in some of your vegetables, so he could make an informed decision!"

Gilbert and his father laughed appreciatively. "It's time we had Father over for dinner anyway," Arthur said. "Shall we speak to him after Mass?"

"Oh, let's. I wanted to show him how the painting for St. Xavier's office is coming along."

Gilbert wished the summer would never end. Every day seemed to bring some new discovery, and his parents never minded the long hours he spent alone, reading or digging in his patch of the garden to see what crawled for a moment into the sunlight.

His father had borrowed a student microscope from the university, and they set it up under a bright window in the basement. His mother refused to allow them to bring bugs and dirt and leaves into the main part of the house.

/But you bring flowers in all the time/, signed Gilbert, /and they sometimes have bugs on them./

Nevertheless, the microscope remained on the basement workbench, although Frances' artistic soul was as thrilled as their scientific ones at the sight of orderly rows of green leaf cells, or the iridescent veins still pumping in the wing of a smoke-stunned fly.

/There is something reverent in learning how living things are made/, she signed, carefully fingerspelling "_reverent_", to lend it extra significance. /It reminds me of how we are all made up of little works of art, that keep interacting until we die./

/Then what keeps them interacting, while we're alive?/ asked Gilbert.

/God does, darling./

/That means you don't know./

/That means nobody knows, but it happens, and maybe we're not supposed to know./

"I'm with your mother on this one," Arthur said later on, coming up to tuck him in. "Even the finest scientists I know haven't got all the answers. Nor the priests or the philosophers. Not even Dr. Frankenstein."

"Aw, Dad."

"Listen, son. There are so many things we don't know - so many questions we haven't even learned how to ask yet. But I'll tell you one thing that Father Stewart and the scientists agree on: as many laws of nature as we think we've discovered, there's always something that falls outside those laws. There will always be more questions."

"Always?"

"Now you're just stalling. Close your eyes now."

One August day there was a particularly exciting find in the garden: an owl-pellet, whole and not yet brittle. Gilbert and Arthur spent a happy afternoon in the cool basement dissecting the tiny bones inside, and then poring over an old textbook to identify the remains of the little shrew. They carefully glued the skeleton onto a piece of card to preserve it, and Gilbert had hung it beside his bedroom mirror.

Dr. and Mrs. Daly came for dinner that night, bringing their daughter Nicole. Nicole was Gilbert's best church friend, and had been in his class at school before moving to the Catholic school attached to the church. Gilbert showed Nicole the skeleton, and she didn't flinch at stroking the tiny, perfect bones. Gilbert thought she was marvellous, and shyly told her he wished they were still in the same class. Nicole agreed it would be more fun, and his happiness was complete.

Strangely - or perhaps not so strangely, given the perfect day it had been - it was that night that Gilbert started to feel dragged down by the thought of the new school term. He awoke in the middle of the night to the familiar sensation of creeping dread.

A bad day, a migraine day was coming. Maybe not the next day, but soon, and he knew that the thought of going back to school had likely brought it on.

School itself he liked well enough, especially since he was now allowed to study Math by himself, and was far ahead of his grade. Sometimes it seemed to take forever for the rest of the class to come to understand a simple point. The teachers were mostly sympathetic, but reminded him to be patient. And sometimes his answers in class earned him incredulous looks and laughter from the others, which ended in mimicking taunts at lunchtime.

He had always been shy and kept to himself, but in the last month of third grade, the others had stopped even trying to hide their contempt and dislike of him. Like a cancer, it had spread from one or two of the pretty, popular girls and the sneering class bully to the rest, some of whom really had no quarrel with him except that he was now the target of scorn. And he didn't even have to be near them. Sit by himself he might, on the other side of the schoolyard, but he could hear them tossing his words between them as a sort of chant as they played.

"Why are you picking on me, when I'm only trying to get everything right?" he had asked the bully. "That doesn't make any sense, you know."

"Oh, spare me. Who says things like that, your mother? Oh, wait - _she can't_! You're a nutcase freak and your mom can't even talk. You got no chance at all."

And so the distance between him and the other children had shifted from mere solitude to battle lines being drawn.

It was inevitable, as he had always known it would be. To them, he was insufferable and stuck-up and just different, and to him, they were silly and spiteful with no good reason. They had nothing in common except for being in the same class. The fact that he'd seen it coming made no difference, and when a couple of the teachers realized which way the wind had blown, their kindness and special attention only served to make it worse.

Summer holidays had put an end to it.

Gilbert had only seen a few of his classmates since then, usually out shopping with their mothers, who greeted him and his mother with overexpressive smiles, not knowing how else to deal with a deaf woman and her strange little boy. All the church mothers knew Frances well, and knew that she could lip-read almost as easily as they could hear. Some even used the simple signs that Frances had taught them. But none of the St. Xavier's kids were in Gilbert's class, and so his classmates' mothers looked askance and sometimes guiltily horrified, as if Frances' otosclerosis and Gilbert's unchildlike oddness were contagious.

And now all those people were coming closer.

All that golden summer, he had played with his neighbour Melinda, and Nicole, at whichever house they picked. Melinda only wanted to play house, but that was fine, because he and Nicole could still dig for bugs, and Melinda could scold them to her hearts' content for being dirty children. She would make them 'go to bed', and they would lie on their backs under an improvised blanket tent, and talk quietly or make up stories, and sometime they all dozed off in the afternoons. Sometimes their mothers took turns fixing them picnic lunches. Sometimes Gilbert showed off his ants and the drawings he made of things he saw under the microscope, since they weren't allowed to play with it. Sometimes they picked apples or cherries or peaches from the trees in their back yards, and sometimes they did crazy things like running fully clothed through the sprinkler.

Just being himself was effortless, around them, and he hadn't had a migraine day all summer.

Those days were coming to an end, he thought miserably, curled up under his bedclothes despite the stuffy heat. Only ten days left until school started. Melinda and Nicole went to St. Xavier's School. Maybe he could go there instead? Surely his parents wouldn't mind him asking to go to a church school, if they could afford it. Maybe he could get a scholarship?

He realized with a sick feeling in his stomach that the girls probably wouldn't talk to him, if they were in the same school. They were both a grade above him, anyway. Maybe it was best they all be just church friends.

He awoke again in the morning, feeling cranky and ill, but with an idea that he was surprised he hadn't had before. He asked his parents about it at breakfast.

"You know how I'm studying Math by myself already," he said, playing with his oatmeal, "Isn't there some way a person can go to school at home? Like kids who live too far away do?"

Arthur and Frances shared a look.

"Not looking forward to going back to school?" his father asked casually.

Gilbert shook his head. "Not so much school," he said, "It's the kids. I wish sometimes I..."

"What do you wish, son?"

"I don't know." he looked into his oatmeal, swimming in cream and sliced fresh peaches, that should have been tempting. "It's not that I wish I were different, not really, but...I don't know where it can _stop_," he continued, somewhat desperately, and found himself sniffing back tears. He was surprised. He hadn't realized he was so upset until his own voice told him. "Daddy, can't I go to St. Xavier's? It's a good school, I promise...Dr. Daly wouldn't send Nicole there if it wasn't. I bet I can get a scholarship so it wouldn't cost anything."

/Gibbie, what kind of things do you wish were different?/ his mother asked. /Are the children being mean to you?/

He wiped his mouth and shook his head. He knew somehow he mustn't say anything, that it would be much worse if his parents talked about it with his classmates' parents. Not only for him, but for his mother, too. The church mothers already knew her, though, and he had friends there who might help...but would they?

He forged on, "Isn't there some proper way to do school at home? What about when I have migraines, and just do my work at home for a couple of days anyway? I'm sure I'd be better quicker if I knew I didn't have to go out. I could just stay here and be quiet and do lessons. I wouldn't be any trouble."

His parents looked at each other again.

"Gilbert," his father said, "Have you got a migraine coming on?"

"Sort of. Not yet. I think one's starting, though."

They tried, they really did. They spent much of the day taking turns talking quietly with him or keeping him busy, and encouraged him to talk about school and whatever it was that made him anxious. Gil sensed their kindness and concern were genuine, and he loved them for listening to him. He was able to convey some of the growing divide between himself and his classmates, without naming names. But what could he do? He was powerless against the children at school, and powerless against the advancing torment of the headache.

By bedtime, he couldn't even see their faces through the rippling silvery disturbance in his vision. His mother's gentle goodnight hug made him feel like being held down under water.

The next day was full of sickening, nauseating pain that only Dr. Hunt's prescribed codeine mixture that was supposed to be for grownups could take away. But that made him feel stupid and slow, and though the pain was distant, he could still feel it, and was dizzy. He pulled the covers over his head and stayed there for the entire day, only tiptoeing out to the bathroom, or nibbling at the jam sandwiches and juice his mother had left under a fly screen on his night table.

He knew his parents were talking about him downstairs, signing or writing notes. He wasn't sure if he wished he could hear them, or was glad he couldn't. He hoped with all his might he would be allowed to work at home.

Now there were nine days left of summer.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Before and After<em>**

There were six days left of summer.

Gilbert's parents hadn't said anything more about school, but he could sense a change in the air. He had entered the living room to find conversations hastily diverted, and he knew that they had been staying up later than usual, long after they thought he was asleep. There was no sense of a secret being kept - he knew what that felt like - but there was definitely an unsettled feeling in the house.

But on the face of it, the last week of the holiday was progressing much as the year before had done. When he had recovered from his last migraine day, his father had taken him out shopping for notebooks, a new pen with a proper filling lever, a brass-edged ruler, pencils and erasers - a slide rule, to his surprised delight, with a promise of instruction - and a backpack with lots of pockets.

"At least you get to wear whatever you want," Nicole pointed out, when they were showing off their new school supplies at the Daly's kitchen table, that evening. "I had to get new uniform stuff this year, so of course it's all way too big. I look so dorky."

"I wouldn't mind a uniform," Gilbert replied thoughtfully. "In fact, I think I'd like it better. No need to bother, no one being silly about what their clothes look like."

"Are you serious?" Nicole laughed, "You should see what we do just to look different! Even the boys. One guy got sent home for wearing blue socks instead of black. He _said _they were just faded..."

And today, he was going clothes-shopping with his mother, which he loathed, but she made it as quick a trip as possible. They had already made a single list of what he needed, and where to get it, and then they would come straight home.

They took the bus downtown. It was a sticky-hot day, and Gilbert was glad his mother was one of those non-fussy ones who didn't pester the sales ladies or try to dress him up. Neither of them liked shopping in the department stores, and his mother was happy for him to quickly pick a few choices from the things he tried on, and be done with it. Her keen eye for design and style luckily did not extend beyond helping him pick comfortable clothes and shoes that suited him, or it would have been an awful trip.

He never liked unfamiliar places, and department stores were among the worst. All the strange eyes, and the artificial smiles and bright lights and advertisements, and all the whiny kids sassing back their parents and staring at him as if he were some sort of space alien. If there was ever an environment that could make him more awkward and silent than ever, it was this. Only the fact that his mother found it equally trying prevented him from grumbling enough to make them leave.

But it was soon over. Sharing a conspiratorial look at the last counter, they gathered up the last of the bags and left the air-conditioned store. Frances fanned her face in the afternoon heat, and gestured to a nearby taxi stand. Gilbert nodded enthusiastically. So what if it meant giving up the usual shopping-day milkshake, on a day like this?

Home within minutes, they quickly put the new things away.

/Put on something you like, to show Daddy when he comes home./

He shrugged. /Sure, okay. He won't care./

/Of course he will. He likes to see you looking your best./

Gilbert rolled his eyes and grinned. /All right./

He was lying on the cool wooden floor of the living room, his chin propped in his hands, watching The Addams Family, when his father came home. Arthur had his jacket and tie limply hanging over one arm. He set his briefcase on the floor, and flicked the hallway switch that operated the kitchen and master bedroom lights, to let Frances know he was home.

"Hey, Dad."

"Hey, who's this sharp young man?" Arthur asked, ruffling his hair. "Had an okay day of it?"

"Yeah, it was all right. We were fast."

They shared a look of understanding.

"Addams Family?"

"Yup."

His father kicked off his shoes and settled himself on the couch.

"You're a good kid, Gil. That had to have been hard for both of you."

Gilbert turned and smiled slightly, shrugging, and went back to watching the show.

He heard his mother in the kitchen, and ice clinking, and knew that she was making iced tea. Perfect! In a moment she came through the door with a tray, and set it on the side table, smiling. Gilbert jumped up.

/Can I?/

/Sure./

He poured himself a glass while his mother went to wake his father, who must have fallen asleep right after lying down. No wonder, since he'd been at the university since dawn, trying to get the greenhouse lab ready for classes to begin, before the heat of the day became too much.

"Gilbert, go upstairs." his mother said out loud.

"What?" he turned around. His mother was kneeling on the floor beside the couch, very still, looking at his father's untroubled face.

"Go upstairs. Now. You're not in any trouble. Stay in your room till I call."

He stared at them both uncomprehendingly, his father fast asleep and his mother like a white statue.

He went upstairs.

Sitting on his bed, he registered that it was even hotter upstairs, but he was cold and clammy. His mother had never sounded or looked like that, ever. It wasn't some mushy stuff he wasn't supposed to see. It was something else. Even with his door open, he couldn't make out what his mother was saying. And why was she speaking out loud now, and so quietly? He wanted to creep out onto the landing and try to listen, but his father would hear the creak under the floorboards.

"...Grissom...Hudson Street...sorry...just hope..."

_Why was his mother speaking on the phone?_ Who could she possibly be calling, knowing she wouldn't be able to tell if anyone was on the other end?

In a moment, he heard her calling him again, in a high, strained voice: "Gibbie! Just stay there, Gibbie...it's going to be okay...it's going to be okay."

"Mama," he sniffled, curling up on top of his quilt.

Five minutes later, he heard the sirens, and bolted to the top of the stairs, shaking. His mother opened the front door and three firemen came stomping into the house, following his mother into the living room.

He didn't know if he'd made some sound, or if the last fireman just happened to look up the staircase, but the fireman gave him a palm-down "it's-okay" wave and pointed at him to stay where he was.

He went back into his room and sat on the floor, against the side of his bed, and waited. He heard scuffling, quiet voices, and knew that something awful had happened to his father. Sick? Dead? But people didn't just lie down like that, and close their eyes and die. He must have had some sort of heart attack or something, and they were working on him. But then shouldn't they be taking him to hospital? Or maybe his father was awake and they were just talking now?

More voices. Mr. and Mrs. Suarez, no doubt watching from across the street.

Mrs. Suarez came hurrying upstairs, and stopped when she saw Gilbert sitting forlornly in his room.

"Oh, honey," she said, coming near and gathering him up. "Oh, honey."

He didn't mind Mrs. Suarez' hugs, but he froze when he heard the cut-off cry from downstairs, and then his mother's terrible weeping.

Mrs Suarez pressed his cheek into her shoulder and rocked him back and forth. "Oh, honey," she said, over and over.

So he knew his father was dead.

Mrs. Suarez and Mrs. Daly took turns staying with them for the four days before the funeral, and for a little while afterwards. They made dozens of telephone calls and a freezer full of food, and sat with his mother while she cried and cried. They made sure that he got up and ate breakfast, and was sent outside to play with Nicole and Melinda, though the girls just sat in the Suarez' garden seat and cried too.

Still, nobody told him what, exactly, had happened. Someone brought him a black suit and tie to wear for the funeral and for Church, and his mother was given a suitable black suit with a pillbox hat and veil, and all he remembered feeling was relief that they didn't have to go shopping again.

It was a bigger funeral than Gilbert had thought of, and he realized how many friends his quiet, friendly father had made, and how many people he had helped and taught. So many strange people came up to him and shook his hand and said things that he blanked them out, just nodding, his hand numb as if he had pulled himself away from it.

School was relatively peaceful, after all, if being left completely alone by the other kids was a kind of peace. His teachers were very kind, and seemed most affected when he explained he didn't want less homework, but more. He now had to go to a weekly lunchtime meeting with the school counsellor, a grandmotherly person called Miss Kimball, which certainly cemented the children's opinion of him as a crazy kid. He didn't even try to convince them otherwise. There was a certain freedom to not care anymore, to do and say as he pleased, and not even the class bully or the girls who might have been trying to send him sympathetic looks could touch him.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Christmas Without Dad.<em>**

"Mom? What was in the small one from Uncle Herb?"

/Which one? He gave you the toolbelt, and he and Auntie Irene gave me this dressing gown and these slippers. Was there another one?/

"The small one in the green and gold wrapping paper. Right here." he held up the remains of the paper, with a curl of gold ribbon still taped to it. "I thought it was from Uncle Herb. Maybe it was from Mr. and Mrs. Suarez?"

/Oh, that one. I think it was little gift from one of Daddy's friends. I must write a thank-you note. Don't forget to write your thank-yous,/ she reminded him. /You know you get caught up and forget your chores./

"Yeah, yeah," he pretended to look around absent-mindedly, and his mother chortled. "Can't I just telephone them?" he asked teasingly.

/It's not the same as a letter. You can't hold onto a telephone call and read it again later./

Gilbert's stomach sank. "Mom." he touched her arm. /Mom/, he signed, /I'm sorry. I didn't think./

She smiled and patted his knee. /I know what you meant. You can't always try to avoid saying ordinary things you think might hurt me. I'm still part of the ordinary world, and I understand it perfectly well. I know what you meant./

/It was just a stupid joke. I meant, to save time. Because you know I'll forget again./

/I know that. But while you're thinking about writing those letters, go find my writing-case, and sit down at the table and write, and I'll tidy up all of this and make lunch./

/You're trying to use guilt./

/Yes, I am./ Frances put on an expression of mock severity and pointed to the table. Gilbert got up, grinning, and did as he was bid, knowing full well that once he spread out his new electronics kit, he'd be oblivious to everything else for a long while.

It wasn't until his mother's ironing day later that week, when his mother asked him to hang a couple of freshly-pressed dresses in her closet, that he had cause to go into her room.

He pushed all the hangers to one side, as per his mother's instructions, so that the clean dresses had room to air. He was about to close the door, when he caught sight of his father's suits still hanging on the other end of the rack.

He opened both doors wide, and stood looking at all the empty shoulders and legs hanging in a row. They smelled like his father, of sweet pipe tobacco and earth. His shirt-collars and cuffs were neatly starched, the rest left soft, as he hated anything fussy-feeling while he worked. Frances was happy to oblige, as long as he had a couple of fully-starched dress shirts ready for special occasions "when she had to bring him in from the pasture", as she said. There they were, his father's pristine white percale shirt with the hidden buttons under a plain placket, and the pale blue pinstripe with the white cuffs and old-fashioned studded collar for church.

Gilbert wondered why it felt so odd to reach out and touch them, as if it might be wrong, or as if some trace of his father might reprimand him or be disturbed. He did so anyway, and as the hangers swung gently back against his hand, he thought that it was both silly but entirely understandable, somehow, that the clothing and the belongings of the dead should take on such deep meaning for people. They were just clothes. Material and buttons and zippers. Was it the smell that did it, or just the memories of people wearing them?

For what reason was his mother keeping them there? Was it out of respect, or just not wanting to let go, like a photograph she could touch and remember? That would be better than any letter. She couldn't be hoping his father would return, and if she ever remarried, he thought with nine-year-old simplicity, she'd have to get rid of them anyway, wherever they lived. Did deaf mothers get remarried? Probably some did. He couldn't picture it happening, though. He and his mother could take care of themselves, and while it had never been mentioned, it was clear that his parents had been deeply, permanently devoted to one another.

He went to close the door, and as he did so, he saw a small grey leather-covered box on one of the shelves beside the rack. He hadn't seen it before. He picked it up and turned it over, and saw the embossed logo of a good men's clothing store on the bottom.

Curious, he opened it, and found a pair of cufflinks in plain heavy polished silver, square with rounded corners. They were quite new, and must have cost a fair amount. He wondered who had sent them. Someone who hadn't learned of his father's death? It had only been four months, so -

"Gilbert! Where are you? There's more to go upstairs," Frances called from the kitchen.

He snapped the box closed and put it back.

She had never lost the crispness of her consonants, he thought ruefully, and likely never would. If anything, her speaking voice had become more careful, if a little flat, as if her only concern was to avoid being conspicuous. Which was typical of her.

He stomped twice on the floor in response, quite hard because this room was carpeted, and went back to the kitchen to collect another armload of clean clothes.

Later that night, as he got ready for bed, he realized that the grey box in his father's side of the closet was a perfect match in size to the green wrapping paper his mother had shied away from explaining. She must have bought them months ago. She would never spend money like that now.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Moving On.<em>**

/Mom, slow down. I can't keep up./

/...house is attached, and it's on a street full of live-work design and art studios, and there's even a Catholic church three blocks away./

/Wait, wait. We're moving?/

/Pay attention! I'm looking at a studio-gallery. It's near the ocean, in Marina Del Rey. We've visited there, remember?/

/_What_? Are we going to go look?/

/This weekend. Mrs. Daly and Nicole are coming along too - Mrs. Daly will drive us in Daddy's old car that they bought./

Gilbert gaped at his animated, giggling mother across the dinner table. In the past year, they'd become more friends than parent and child, made more open to each other by shared grief. He'd known she was concerned, but not worried, about living on Dad's pension and investments, and that she wanted to increase her own living from her artwork. So while he wasn't entirely surprised by her plans, he was rather taken aback by her happiness at the prospect of a sudden plunge into the unknown.

/How long have you been planning this?/

/I just learned about it from Father Stewart. He knows the priest of that parish./

/But...what about everything...all our stuff...and school.../

His mother reached out and patted his hand. /If you think it's too soon, we can always wait. But darling, it's been almost a year, and I need to make a change, and I think you do, too. You could finish out the school year, and then we could go right away. It's close enough to come back all the time to see all your friends. We could even come for Church every Sunday if we can arrange to drive with someone./

/If it's so close, why do we need to move?/

/Because it's time, Gibbie. Sometimes you can't move on without moving, even a little ways. Everything.../ she indicated the whole house. /Everything reminds me of the life your father and I built here, and how much it'll never be the same. But I have so much more to do, and you're not happy either./

Gilbert realized he felt quite different than he had done before the conversation, as if a physical change had occurred within him. He felt as if he'd been propelled into a new state of being, and he wondered if this is what people meant when they said he'd have to be the man of the family now. He didn't have to think and react as he used to do. He could be there for his mother and fight for her just as she had fought for him all these years, never stopping in her search to help him figure himself out and learn to navigate the world.

/I think we should do it./ he signed. /It sounds perfect for you. And I...I don't know what I need right now, but you're right. It's not here./


	3. Dead Money

**Chapter Three:**  
>Dead Money<p>

* * *

><p><strong><em>Sundays<em>**

"And yet you've always seemed like such a soulful sort," Father Stewart said. "Like your father, God rest him. I can tell you without a doubt not to worry. The soul is a subtle thing, Gilbert. You can't measure it along a series of scales."

They sat in Father's study at St. Xaviers', on a drizzly, chilly Sunday afternoon in March. Father had provided tea and dear Mrs. Hamilton's excellent lemon cake, and even turned up the heat for his guest's comfort. Downstairs, Frances Grissom and the rest of the congregants partook of their weekly fellowship tea and catch-up in the Church Hall.

It was ironic that such a scrupulously tidy, polite teenager should be questioning the goodness of his soul, when there were other kids in the current Confirmation class that could have used a little self-honesty. Father Stewart knew quite well that it was mostly by chance that Gil's behaviour fell into step with the expectations of a young Catholic, and that a skeptical mind like Gilbert's would likely find a less spiritual foundation upon which to lean before he became a man.

In the meantime, one did one's best to boost morale: church attendance was down all over, and lapsed Catholic youths with pleasant memories were less shy about rejoining the fold as adults.

"But I know my own mind when I'm thinking something through." said Gilbert. "Why should it be so hard to know my own soul when I'm...is there even a verb for what a soul does? If the state of the soul is so important, why don't we have proven ways to tell what state it's in?"

"A true Aristotelian," Father smiled. "Of course we do, but you'll never find a man-made instrument to do the job. We _are_ the instrument of observation. It's something we find out for ourselves, through listening to ourselves, consulting the conscience, and talking as we're doing now. And it's not something that many people your age need to worry about. Has something happened, Gil? Is there some way I can offer you more support?"

It was hard to imagine how the many families of St. Xavier's could support Gil and Frances more than they already had. The remaining Grissoms both looked forward to Sundays, for very different reasons. Although there was a well-established Catholic parish in Marina del Rey, Frances was deeply attached to St. Xavier's in Santa Monica. They made the short trip each week, driven by a rotation of friends. The community had been her emotional pillar and inspiration during the loss of her hearing and her husband, and Gilbert's difficult navigation through childhood.

The community had even helped fund her Marina Del Rey studio-gallery's first critical year of operations, commissioning a series of paintings for various rooms in the church building and school, and twelve scenes for a fundraising calendar.

The spinoff publicity had ensured her a moderate but regular success with her exuberant, secular paintings and functional wooden sculptures. In the past few years, she had finally allowed herself to stop worrying about finances or her place in the world, and her old effervescent self had slowly reasserted itself, as much to Gilbert's relief as her own.

Gilbert, on the other hand, liked Father Stewart, and held his scholarship in high regard, but looked forward most of all to seeing Nicole and Melinda. They usually had the whole afternoon together, while their parents chatted or went on excursions. Gil had made a few pals at his new school, and even had a good friend in Matt Paulowicz from Chess Club, but there was nothing like reuniting with Nicole and Melinda.

Even if Melinda was trying very hard to be a fiercely political Latina hippie now, embroidering her jeans with bright anti-war slogans and loudly protesting American involvement in Vietnam, and pretty Nicole acted like a movie star on the verge of discovery, once together they fell into their old familiar ways.

Their Sundays were a place of uncritical calm in a world that seemed to be a different place entirely from that of their early days. Even for passionately religious, saint-obsessed Melinda, it wasn't hip to discuss the sermon, or what happened in Youth Group, but they naturally gravitated towards the things that mattered deeply to each of them. They sat outside in the garden, or in one of the girls' rooms, or over soda floats at Penny's Diner, and they would take turns listening to each other, talking even about the hardest or most awkward things. They had never had to ask for one another's confidences to be kept.

It had always been understood that these were sacred conversations, and even as little kids, they shared an uncanny sense that this was the real Sunday School.

Gil knew, though he never would had said, that as much good as his parents and well-intentioned counsellors had done him as a child, it was the girls who had given him a reason to keep trying to rejoin the world. And he often thought he was lucky, having sisters he could give back at the end of the day.

So it was, that today after church, he had forgone the convivial crowd in the hall, knowing he would have plenty of time to talk to the girls later on. He had asked Father Stewart if he could speak with him, and was startled when Father had agreed right away, and ushered him into his study. Maybe it was a silly question? Maybe Father would find something wrong with his soul, put a name to the veil that seemed to separate him from other people?

Or just maybe, it was the answer he had been looking for all along, the missing piece of the human puzzle, that everyone else seemed to find so easy?

"Not really. I mean, nothing's happened. It's just, if I can understand so much about other things, then why can't I understand something so important? And if we all have them, how did people figure it out in the first place? How could two people talking about some experience of something they called a soul ever be sure they were talking about the same thing?"

Father tried to keep up with the stream: "Surely we all experience the soul in different ways, depending on our own minds and memories. Not everyone hears in the same way. Your mother still hears, though not with her ears."

"Well, I...guess, but - sometimes, when you lose a sense, the others make up for it, don't they?"

"Do you feel you have to compensate for something? We haven't spoken about your father in a few years now. Are you sure you're not trying to measure yourself against a memory of a fully-grown adult, with years of education and experience beyond yours?"

Gilbert appreciated that Father Stewart didn't try to assure him that all teenagers felt alone and misunderstood. It was a genuinely solitary place he inhabited at school, but at least it wasn't the relentless taunting and cold ostracism of his early childhood.

So what more did he want? Some days, he felt like an alien observer out of Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke, sent to look around impassively, driven to seek out the truth. It still didn't make sense to him that anyone could consider it a character flaw to want to understand something perfectly. Sometimes the kids called him "Professor", or more commonly, "Mr. Spock", but at least they left him mostly to himself.

Gilbert wasn't the type to get choked up, but he had to admit that there were dark nights when he was shamefully glad his mother couldn't hear his tears. Who was he? What was he? Was there such a thing as an alien that didn't know he was an alien?

"I don't know. I don't get souls, and I don't get people. I study them all the time. It's like they don't want to be understood. Just when they begin to make sense, I realize I was wrong. Those are the two things I really don't get, so I wonder if there's some connection that I've missed...if I can make sense of one, maybe the other will make sense."

"We're all unique, son." Father said. "But people have been grappling with the question of the soul for millennia. There are all sorts of readings that I'll be happy to pass along to you, but let me tell you, I'm not worried about your soul. The fact that you're seeking these answers should tell you something. Science-minded people like you come with a different set of tools than the artists and poets among us. You've studied particles and waves in Physics? Sometimes the only way we know that a particle existed is to see the path it made."

Gilbert nodded. There was something to that. "I wouldn't mind reading something more. And I like the wave idea."

Father Stewart stood up, six foot three and Nordic-fair, and Gilbert, rather smaller, did too. He shook the priest's outstretched hand.

"Have you considered that we are sent to master the things that confound us?" Father asked. "We might just make a priest of you yet."

He saw from the boy's face that this was not the first time the thought had struck him, and decided to say nothing more on the topic, for now. "Just don't forget, will you," he finished, "the Church has ample room for scientists, and I hope you know we certainly like having _you_ around." 

* * *

><p><strong><em>Biology<em>**

It was getting harder to talk to Nicole, these days, unless Melinda joined them, forming the keystone in their old triumvirate. Their rapid-fire conversations were as interesting as ever, but it took Nicole longer each time to stop trying to be cute, and more like the girl he used to collect tadpoles with. She mostly did what she was told during the week, toeing the line with her school uniform and behaviour, and moodily obeying the more rigidly enforced dictates of her parents at home, as far as they knew.

Gil knew she'd been sneaking out at night, taking advantage of her parents' disbelief that their only child would do such a thing, to see her boyfriend, an eighteen year old dropout with a cadre of edgy, semi-delinquents. In typical Nicole fashion, she'd picked the leader of the group, the smartest, smoothest-talking and still somewhat respectable looking one, and none of the others gave her any trouble.

She seemed most herself in the University Botanical Gardens, where they had spent so many afternoons. They walked there now, early in the evening on a September Saturday, after being released from semi-voluntary labour with Dr. Daly in the greenhouse. While they waited for him, they wandered down the old path, pointing out trees and shrubs and herbariums that were familiar to them as their own gardens at home. It was a brilliantly sunny day at the beginning of the new school term, and everything, including Nicole, was sweet-smelling and bright.

Nicole's new self wasn't all bad, Gil thought. Unlike other girls who were all growing their hair long and wavy, Nicole lightened and curled hers into a sort of blonde nimbus around her face. Her jeans were as tight as other girls' were loose and flared, and she wore makeup as often as she could get away with it. And she was still as smart and funny as ever.

She may have been trying too hard to be twenty, thought Gilbert, but she was definitely different. She'd been his gateway into the world of kids for as long as he could remember, and she wasn't afraid of _anything_, to the extent that he and Melinda had remonstrated with her more than once.

It was lucky they knew one another so well, or he'd have found himself frozen in shock when Nicole dared him to kiss her, as they wandered through a section of low, picked-clean huckleberry bushes and gangly spruce trees in the sun-dappled forest. His instinct was to laugh.

"Want me to what? Oh, come off it. You do not. What about your boyfriend? You trying to get me beat up?"

"Don't be a jerk. I didn't say I wanted you to. I said I dared you to."

"What's the difference?"

"There is one!"

"You didn't think I would if I thought you _wanted_ me to, but I might if you dared me to? What the hell kind of a thing is that?"

Nicole sighed, put off. "Never mind. It was stupid. Forget it."

They walked further along the path, past the huge Douglas Fir under whose spreading limbs they used to act out long, rambling stories, lost in their own world.

"Do you want me to?" he asked.

He wondered if Nicole, in the only way she knew how to control, was trying to reach out for something more stable than her dodgy boyfriend. Which was encouraging, but nothing in which he wanted to play a part.

"I don't know," she said, "Shouldn't I? You're my best friend in the whole world, and you're, I don't know, kind of cute. I mean, you turned out okay."

He felt a rush of affection, and it sort of made sense after all.

"Well," he said, "So did you. Turn out okay. And you're my best friend, too, but it would be really weird. I think I'd rather give you a hug."

She stared at him. "I thought you didn't know much about girls and stuff. You sound all grown-up. You're supposed to be so innocent."

"Well, we've known each other longer than a lot of grownups have. And I'm a nerd. I study everything. Even girls. Sometimes."

"You are a nerd," Nicole agreed, "but you're also a good guy."

"They're mutually exclusive?"

"That's not what I meant."

"I know what you meant."

They walked on.

"Okay," she said suddenly.

"Okay what?"

"Okay, I do want you to give me a hug."

"Oh. Okay."

They stopped. She held out her arms awkwardly, and so did he, and somehow they fit. He was hugging a girl, Nicole, for the first time, really, and the supple strength of her, her warm body and the softness of her nice-smelling clothes all flooded his senses. It was a little like hugging a cat or a dog, that might wriggle away if he wasn't careful. After a moment of hesitation she rested her head against his shoulder. He realized with a pang that here was a girl who had all the boys running after her, and she wanted _him_ to hug her. To hold onto her. In friendship or otherwise, it didn't matter. It made something inside him melt and his arms tightened around her.

She squeezed back. The unfamiliar sensation of a girl breathing against him had a predictable physical effect on him, but it served to remind of something.

"Hey." he said, pulling away. He held onto her arms.

"Hm?"

"You want to be careful, daring some guys to kiss you. There's some real assholes out there."

"Oh, as if. I know better than that. You're safe. That's why – I mean, it's not like you're anything like the – "

"I know. It's cool."

"So...did you ever? Kiss anyone?"

"Nope. But I guess you have."

"Well, yeah. But that's all. Well, almost."

He found himself relieved. Whatever crazy game Nicole was playing with herself, she wasn't completely out of control. She wasn't the youngest girl he knew to be getting heavy with her boyfriend, but he had a feeling that when she did, there would be no turning back for her.

"So what the hell was all that about? Your JD boyfriend doesn't know we're friends, right? Or he'd have done something to me by now. Whaddya think, concrete shoes? Maybe send the big man down from Chicago?"

"Shut up. He's not a JD. He just had a bad year at school, and he's taking a break. He knows you're like my brother. He knows you're a brain. I just told him you knew all sorts of things that could mess him up."

"Aw, shit, Nicole." he stopped. "Seriously, what if he thinks I could help him mess someone else up?"

She burst out laughing. "Relax, willya? I just told him our parents were friends from way back, and that you're totally safe."

He wondered whether 'safe' was the extent to which a girl would think of him. Even at fifteen, he knew he was in some different category as far as the rituals of dating went. He couldn't imagine being part of the casual couples that formed and re-formed. Did dating just not mean as much to the other kids? Maybe he was really gay, and didn't know it? Or maybe Father Stewart was right, and he was supposed to be a priest, celibate, learned, meant to be helpful from a distance? Could that be the source of his alienation? Neither seemed very likely, but at least it hardly mattered in Grade Nine.

Was there reason to hope that there might be, someday, some girl with whom it would all just...fit?

_Four hundred miles to the north, a newborn drew her first breath and squalled loudly, pummelling the air with her tiny feet and fists, as if she knew already what her young life would hold._

* * *

><p><strong><em>Gruesome Grissom<em>**

"You did not."

"I did so. Why would I lie?" Gil asked Dave Radlett, his Biology partner. They walked to the lab after lunch, eavesdropping on the moaning, giggling girls ahead of them, who had made a lunchtime fasting pact, due to the upcoming frog dissection class.

"You just picked it up and what, cut it up at home? Your own frog?"

"Yeah." Gil shrugged. "The ones in class are like tire rubber from the formaldehyde, and they inject stuff into the veins to make the organs stand out. It was just going to decompose anyway. So why not?"

"Didn't it stink? Were there maggots and stuff?"

"Well, yeah. I just kept sticking it under the hose in the back yard. It wasn't bad. Better that than a lungful of formaldehyde. That stuff is poison, and they don't even give us gas masks. They just pay off any kid's family who dies from it."

At this, the girls, who had been pretending not to listen to them, turned and went quiet.

"Yeah, that formaldehyde is nasty stuff, man. It'll make your lungs bleed out right through your chest, if you get too much of it." Gil said, more than loud enough for them to hear.

The girls glared at him and strode off.

"You're a freak, man." Dave told him, chuckling.

"Yeah, yeah. But it was actually pretty cool inside. And I bet I ace this thing."

"Gruesome Grissom."

"You just don't know what you're missing."

"Freak."

Somewhere along the way, it had become a badge of honour.

* * *

><p>Gil, what on earth are you - /

Frances saw what he held in his hands and shrieked aloud.

He set the limp adult raccoon on the wooden bench on the flagstones in the backyard of the gallery, and signed back quickly.

/It's just a raccoon, Mom. Must have been hit by a car. I'm not bringing it inside. I just want to look at it./

/It's crawling with insects! For heaven's sake, get rid of it!/

/Mom, don't you know raccoons and humans have similar skeletons and muscles? I just want to see...I'll be careful. It was either that or leave it for the crows, or the wildcats. I promise, I'll wash up before I come in./

Frances had one hand over her heart and the other over her mouth, but she lowered them with a look of sick disgust to say: /My God. It's halfway rotten. What were you thinking?/

/But it isn't. It's just the first maggots. It doesn't even smell. I'll wash them off. Really, it's no big thing. I'd take it to the school lab, but I'd get my teachers in trouble. How is this any different from dissecting bugs under Dad's old microscope? Or the butcher cutting up pork chops? It's just part of life, right?/

/You're not a vet, or - or some sort of forest ranger! You don't know what sort of diseases that animal might be carrying! There are proper places to do that kind of work, and my back yard is not one of them!/

Gil had a thought.

/What if I ask Doc Webb if I can take it to the vet clinic, and examine it there? She'd have everything I need. Mom, isn't this better than ordering up some pickled carcass from a supply house, that was only raised to be killed and cut up?/

Frances threw up her hands.

/If Doctor Webb says it's okay, and she takes it away tonight, then fine. But she has to agree to be there with you./

/Deal./

Despite Frances' fervent hope that Doc Webb would talk the boy out of his newest hair-raising obsession - at least _this_ one, she thought, was unlikely to cause the house electrical circuits to short out, or a colony of jumping spiders to escape in the painting studio - it was to be the first in a long, fruitful series of evening work for Gilbert and Doc Webb.

By the end of the summer, word had gone around that that nice Grissom boy, the artist's son, had his driver's permit and a small but reliable station wagon, and didn't mind coming to collect deceased pets if Doc Webb was on a call or asleep. Eventually even the local police started calling him to come pick up untagged cats and dogs found within the town boundaries, or the smaller victims of the highway. Doc Webb was vastly amused, and grateful to pass along these middle-of-the-night calls to her young acolyte.

"You sure you don't want to go to vet college?" She asked him one afternoon in August, up to her wrists in disinfectant soap. They were cleaning up after a necroscopy on Mrs. Hausmann's precious Ting, dead before his time from an undetected heart valve defect, and not, as she insisted, by poisoning at the hands of a vindictive neighbour.

He looked up from swabbing down the stainless steel operating table.

"...No. I like the animals just fine. I don't think I could handle some of the pet owners."

"You have a point there," said Doc.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Commencement<em>**

Gil was by far the youngest of his graduating class, at age sixteen and ten months, a full year ahead of schedule. It hadn't been terribly difficult, even if it meant giving up the summer between eleventh and twelfth grade to completing his English and History requirements. In fact, he found himself wondering just how low the adult world's expectations of him had sunk. What happened to being able to stumble through Aristophanes or the German philosophers in the original, or to understand the historical significance of scientific discoveries through the ages?

Dumbing-down wasn't the term for it. Nothing a student did in school even seemed to _matter_ to the real world. School was a place to wait out the time until they supposed you could handle yourself, however much knowledge you had or hadn't got. Whether you scored all A's or barely scraped by, you got the same diploma and the same praise.

It wasn't nearly enough for him. He found ways of bringing his work home, dredging slowly through the Wycliffe Bible in Middle English, in order to prove a point for a single Lit class discussion. Instead of a Biology research paper, he submitted the full examination report of one of his and Doc Webb's necroscopies, a tough old bull moose that had survived being loaded with buckshot five years ago, only to die of lead poisoning later on. He not only studied the great chess games with the others in the Chess Club, but tried his hand in competition, placing higher than even he expected in the state rankings by the time senior year studies took over his time.

UC-Berkeley had practically thrown a full scholarship at him, renewable each year contingent upon a minimum cumulative 3.5 GPA.

College, at first, confirmed his suspicions. Nearly all the first-year science material was a rebroadcast of high school. Berkeley undergrad life was a lot like what he imagined boarding school to be, but with fewer restrictions, and rampant sex, drugs and politics. There was a popular affectation of jaded dissatisfaction with everything from the food in the dining hall to Professor Kilgallan's insistence on holding English lectures at nine o'clock in the morning, sharp.

True, there were serious matters. The memory of the Ohio shootings still lingered in the minds of students across the country. Vietnam dragged on, relentless and disillusioning, and then there were ongoing debates about the Space Race and free campus birth control. It was hip to have an opinion about these things, and to call oneself pro or anti, but Gil preferred to listen, and support whichever side was flagging. He developed a reputation as a decent Devil's Advocate, or a prime bullshitter - depending on who he argued against.

To his great luck, within a week he felt right at home. He found a room in a shared house of six serious Biology students, near to the university. They had kept their household going for nearly ten years as a sort of unofficial off-campus Bio fraternity, complete with a house cat of unknown parentage or vintage, named Zöe. He didn't think he would want to live in such a communal human zoo for four whole years, but he couldn't have found a better situation to see him launched into university life.

He was accepted unanimously into the house, and was a natural fit from the beginning. Obsession with a study topic was normal, even de rigeur, for the scientists among whom he found himself. He didn't have to downplay his speech or thoughts. He was a neophyte in relation to the seniors in the house. He even found himself thwarted in Chess by a second-year housemate who had played competitively since childhood.

So it was that the first term, which could have been a total bust, turned into a fascinating entry into the human world. What did it matter that half his courses were rote review of high school, and that most of his professors wouldn't recognize him? He was swimming in his natural element at last.

Gil went to classes, memorized what he thought worth remembering, played a lot of chess, and asked Emilia Suarez to send him his favourite Mexican recipes when it came his turn to cook. He eventually got to know the professors and researchers in the Biology department, and they in turn encouraged the eager student to make the most of every opportunity he could, in the four short years of his undergraduate degree.

"_Three_ short years, I bet," Gil would say, "What else have I got to do in summer?" 

* * *

><p>Frances came up on the Greyhound to visit him, in November.<p>

/I've never seen you look so happy,/ Frances signed a little wistfully, sitting in his dining room after his housemates left them alone, after introductions. /If only we could have popped you into college the minute you started school./

/I'd be insufferable./

Frances giggled. "Yes, you would," she said aloud, her voice still crisp, but a little flatter of tone than in previous years, /But your dad would be so pleased to see you. And your roommates seem very nice./

/Of course they're nice, Mom. We're all dorks./

/D-O-R-K-S?/

/Nerds. Science types. Chess-playing sci-fi nuts with no girlfriends, and fascinations with fields of study that make other people's eyes cross. You know./

/So was your father, and I still love him as much as I ever did./

Gil had to turn away from his mothers bright eyes. He hadn't realized the extent to which a Grissomian return to university would affect her, but of course it must: his parents had met in university, and their marriage had revolved around academic life.

And now here he was, working on a Biology degree of his own - not the Horticultural Science of his father, but, he had decided, Insect Biology. He'd always respected and been fascinated by the bugs of his acquaintance, through garden digging and Science Fairs. He thought he could keep interested in a career of studying their highly evolved symbiosis with other living systems.

He explained as much to his mother, giving her time to compose herself while he rambled.

/Dad was right,/ he said. /If you want to understand some part of nature, study the bugs. They'll never fool you. They're like little computers, and we're just now beginning to understand all the information we can get out of them, if we can figure out how to ask. Even cures for diseases! When I made all those ant farms and bee frames, I never thought I'd end up making a career out of it./

/Really? I certainly did./ Frances replied, /We always knew you were born to be a scientist. But I thought you were into animal biology. All those creatures you took to Doc Webb's to autopsy.../ she shuddered.

/Necroscopy, you mean. That's what gave me the idea in the first place. The animals were interesting, but the insects started to seem like old friends. They make sense./

/Just spare your old mom the details. You know I can't help seeing everything over and over in my mind, and I'm supposed to be painting a series of Christmas cards for the Church./

/Not what you had in mind for the Nativity scene?/ Gil grinned wickedly, /Which reminds me, what's going on with the Dalys? They sent a card when I left, but I haven't heard since. I wrote Nicole twice./

Frances sighed unhappily.

/What?/

/Gibbie, Nicole has moved to Boston, to finish at a new school. She...got involved with a bad crowd over the summer...It was just best for her that she get away for a while./

/What? You don't mean she's pregnant?/

/No, no. Just some bad-news types who wouldn't leave her alone. Her boyfriend and his gang. I gather she ran away with him a couple of times. And she was caught smoking at school. Not just tobacco. And lying to her parents about money. You know she'd been unhappy for a long time before. They thought trying a change would be better than getting...other people involved./

Other people, meaning the probation officers and juvenile authorities who had probably raised Nicole's boyfriend in their various state facilities. Well, they were probably right, even if saving face was at the heart of it. Nicole wouldn't fare well in a place like that, he thought, badly shocked at the thought of his childhood friend caught up in the shadowy edge of the criminal underworld. Nicole had always been jumping out of her skin to grow up, and get away from the family she found so stiflingly upstanding, but this...

"Dammit," he shook his head. /I should have been there. I thought she just didn't want to hang out with Melinda and me any more, that we were too tame for her. I should have made her promise./

/Promise what?/

/Not to let jerks take advantage of her. She was getting too full of herself, but she didn't know how innocent she really was. Do you have her address?/

/I don't, but I'll ask Joanne to send it to you. You were always a good influence on her. You did nothing wrong. Joanne just didn't know how to tell you./

A thought struck him.

/Mom, how's the church group treating them? Everyone must know why she left./

/I'm sure they do, by now. Father Stewart's been wonderful. I think he was the one who suggested the move. It's not a reform school or anything. Just a girls' boarding school./

Gil thought to himself that a girls' boarding school was not likely to keep Nicole interested for long, New England cachet or not, and wondered how soon she would make a break for it.

/Father Stewart's always wonderful. How are the others treating them?/ he persisted.

/Not that well./ Frances' mouth was drawn tight. /The Suarez' and the Humphries' have been very supportive, at least./

He had a hazy memory of his mother protecting him from suspicious, gossipy neighbours, and the St Xavier's community that was their refuge at the time. No wonder Frances was shocked at the treatment given to her old friends when they obviously needed help most desperately.

/What about forgiveness?/ he signed vaguely, almost to himself.

/That only holds true if someone knows they've done wrong. Nicole was so angry and confused, Gil. She needed some time away to think. But most people don't see it that way. The community's gotten hard hearted, there aren't many young people left in the congregation, and they were looking for someone to make an example of./

/And it's Nicole, who never harmed anyone but herself./ he signed. /And you? How are you holding up?/

/I'm waiting for cooler heads and warmer hearts to prevail./

/You could paint Jesus blessing Mary Magdalene, for one of the Christmas cards...That'd make a point./

Frances rolled her eyes and sighed. /I'm going to make sure she's not forgotten, anyway. I'll shame them into sending her a nice Christmas parcel at school if I have to./

But by Christmas, nobody knew where Nicole was, and despite Father Stewart's efforts, the Dalys had been smilingly, sympathetically, shut out of the community. For Gil and Frances, it was the fulcrum of decision. Frances and Joanne Daly began attending St. Pat's, within walking distance of Frances' gallery. Gil, though he still wrote occasionally to Father Stewart, felt a nostalgic pang for the people that had helped raise him, and left the church entirely, to nobody's surprise.

It was the last Gil would hear of Nicole for thirty-five years. 

* * *

><p><strong><em>Coming of Age<em>**

A letter from Las Vegas:

August 20, 1977

Dear Mom,

Hello from the Rodeo Inn, as near to the Bellagio as we could afford. I believe we actually get a sliver of the Bellagio's shadow in the evening. All went according to plan: Phil and Gretchen eloped and are now hiding out in Mexico for a week. Small Vegas chapel, but quite nice actually. P&G very happy, G's parents somewhat less so. Valerie, however, has decided she needs space, so don't worry that we'll be doing the same. We're still friends, I think. She says hello. I'm doing okay.

I've only been of age 3 days and it turns out I could be a pro poker player. Guess all those midnight study breaks with the guys paid off after all. Except now I've won all this loot, and there's nobody to spend it on except the Desperado and the Screamer II. Not that there's any lack of friendly people here who would be only too happy to take it off my hands in a variety of ways. Maybe I'll spring for one night at the Bellagio for myself and the remaining bachelors after all. Want me to send you to Paris for a month? Home as arranged on Sept 1.

Love, Gil. 

* * *

><p><strong><em>Dead Money<em>**

"You want to what, kid?"

"I'm serious, Chief."

Chief County Coroner Doug Trainor looked hard at his newest, and youngest, staff coroner, and took a long drag on his smoke.

For someone so wet, this Grissom was unflappable at a scene, and had an annoying way of shaming his elders out of their usual heavy humour with just a look. And now this. Five acres of riverfront property that he was offering to donate for a Body Farm.

The County had had every application turned down, for leases on university, public or private land, and was about to unroll the prayer mat and ask the State for more taxes to purchase its own plot, when along comes this hotshot and his five acres.

And he didn't have the least glimmer of brown-nose about him. He acted like he was just sharing his toys. Being a regular guy.

Six weeks into the job, Trainor knew his latest hire was anything but regular.

"It's even on a river, with variegated shade conditions and animal activity. I know I work here, so there'd be a conflict, but I could – I could sell it to my mother for a nominal fee, and she could lease it to the County."

Grissom glanced over at him for his response, steering the Coroner's Service van down the freeway off-ramp towards the LAPD morgue. New kids always drove. It was a test of nerves, driving around a dead body, or two, or bits of one, around the Los Angeles freeways and one-way mazes, with the police radio squawking contradictory orders a mile a minute. Plus, Trainor liked to be chauffeured.

"You know you wouldn't be able to use it for anything for maybe five years after the research is done." Trainor pointed out.

"I know. I thought I'd want to build and live out there, where it's quiet, but when would I have time? I'm at school or in court most of the day, and out at scenes most of the night. I don't need to use it right now."

"Grissom, you're a piece of work." Trainor said. "So how does a little nerd like you get a parcel of riverfront by age twenty-two?" he asked.

"Poker."

"Seriously. Did you inherit?"

"Poker. Went to Vegas after grad with some friends, to get an old roommate married off, and reach majority in style. I mean, you might as well turn twenty-one in a place like Vegas. And I cleaned up. Came home with a nice bank draft, and I suddenly had no girlfriend to spend it on, after all. I'm in grad school on a research grant, and bank rates are abysmal, so the land looked like the best place to bury it."

"What the fuck. Just like that."

"Just like that."

Grissom's face belied not a trace of anything, which led Trainor to suspect that the kid had had his heart ripped out and his balls kicked in during what should have been his one-way trip to manhood. Which could be a fatal thing for a terminal nerd who had finally gotten a girlfriend: they tended to give up on girls altogether, claiming to be too busy, and getting progressively weirder until they met a girl just like them, or at least a very patient one who would undertake to retrain them into human form. And that could take years, if they were lucky.

"I guess we shouldn't try to bluff you, huh."

"Probably not," Grissom lit up with a sudden grin that made him look his age, for once. "So, is it nuts?"

"Damn right it's nuts. But it might just work. You got a family lawyer?"

"Yup."

"Get some advice, talk to mother dear, sleep on it, and let me know. I'll talk to some people out here. No favours, you understand."

Grissom looked confused. "I...wasn't looking for any. But it's right there to be used, so why not? And if it's ours, on private land, we can do whatever the hell we want with it, no special applications necessary except the enviro permits. Even the really toxic cadavers. The ones leaching cyanide or heavy metals. We can build underground shields and canals to capture the runoff, like they do in the big body farms out east. We'd have an entirely different array of insects to document. We'd have people from all over the country coming to see."

Trainor stared at him and reached for his smokes. He tapped the pack on his arm and extracted a cigarette, lighting it off the current one.

"When're you finished school?" he asked. "You're gonna want to be full-time when all this goes down, right?"

"Masters by this time next year, all going well," Grissom replied, easing into the parking complex at the smaller of the two downtown precincts. "I definitely want to work in the field for a while though, so yeah, if you have the hours, I'll take 'em. No point in doing a PhD with nothing but lab research to bring into it."

"Twenty-two," muttered Trainor. "You're a piece of work, Grissom," he said again.

Maybe, thought Gilbert, that was the adult appellation for "freak"?

He could live with that.


	4. Family Mantras

**Chapter Four:_  
><em>**Family Mantras

* * *

><p><em>Telling Stories<em>

"Just shut up!"

"Mike, _no!_For God's – "

A hollow thud. A grunt of pain, or resignation, or both.

Then silence.

Satya kept her eyes closed. She lay so still that she was just a bump under the blankets, if anyone was there to see.

A door slammed, and footsteps grew faint in the house. In the next room, her mother shifted and went back to whatever it was she had been doing.

Satya breathed again. It was going to be another stay-quiet day, but at least Daddy had remembered his promise to go away for a while when he got mad. Maybe by the time she got home from school, they would be friends again.

She used to wonder what made Daddy so mad, but she knew better now. It was just part of Daddy, and when he wasn't mad, he was the best Daddy in the world. The smart thing to do was to distract him or get him to laugh at something, even at her. She could make him laugh, almost always, although she had to watch out she didn't startle him, or that he didn't grab her too hard. Daddy was strong. He was the strongest Daddy there was.

When they were upset, she just stayed in her room and kept as quiet as she could. She read her books or watched the gray-green ocean swells roll in and out, from the window beside her bed, waiting. But those times never lasted long. It was rare for them to stay mad longer than a day, and sometimes they were better within a few hours.

And winter was the worst time anyway. It wasn't always like that. Satya had lived in the big oceanside guest house her whole life, all of four years and six months, and she knew the pattern. Spring and summer were marvellous and far too short. Fall and winter were to be gotten through with as well as could be managed.

Satya could always tell summer was coming because Mommy did her yoga more often, sitting by herself in one of the guest rooms, chanting mantras in Sanskrit. She taught Satya how to greet the sun in the morning, breathing and stretching in poses that she said were thousands of years old. She told Satya the story of her name: _Satya Narayan_, the divine truth and rightness within all the living things that would eventually return in little bits to the sea, where the god Narayana, or Vishnu, lived.

Satya loved hearing that story. She wondered how Mommy could have known how much her little girl would love the sea, and never want to live anywhere but right beside it. It was a comforting thought to know that when she grew old and died like Mommy's mommy, Grandma Iris, part of her could swim forever in the sea with the big god Vishnu and never get tired or cold.

And Satya liked being right, so it was lovely to be named for rightness. She tried to be right as much as she could, although she was starting to understand that Mommy meant something different than just knowing the right answers to things.

"It means that everything has a right to be, sweetheart, and that it's right that everything that exists does exist. Everything has a reason for being here. You, me, Daddy, everyone and everything."

Satya wondered if Mommy was teasing her and playing with words, the way she sometimes did.

"How come you don't have an Indian name?" Satya asked her once, somewhat pityingly.

"Because my mommy didn't study with a guru, and the only names she felt like she understood were American ones. My yoga teacher helped Daddy and me pick out your name as soon as we knew we were having you. And he gave me one, too. He and my yoga friends call me Lakshmi instead of Laura."

"Does it mean something, like mine does?"

"It's the name of a Hindu goddess. That little statue over there is Lakshmi. She looks after everyone around her, and helps bring them prosperity and comfort."

Satya was very impressed at having a mother named for a goddess. And Laura looked like a goddess, tall, airy-thin but strong, her gaze very intense. Sometimes she moved and spoke as if the very air around her was too heavy for such a light creature, and everything she did became deliberate and thoughtful. And other times, she seemed filled with energy, and she danced as she worked, and laughed a lot, and was so happy she didn't even want to sleep, but stayed up writing stories or working on some project for the guest house.

Laura would set out new flowers in the beds and window-boxes, and air out the guest room linens in neat rows on cords strung along the huge porch that overlooked the sea at the back. She wore her favourite old jean shorts and sleeveless blouses, the last bruises of winter fading under a new golden tan, her long honey-coloured hair in a swinging thick braid under her headscarf. She told long stories as Satya puttered beside her, and in the evenings, they all sat on the mosquito-screened back porch and played cards or sang with Daddy's guitar.

In late spring, Daddy would begin tidying the tool shed, and start working again on the old three-storey house, touching up the blue and white wooden shingles and cleaning the outsides of all the windows. Sometimes Mom raced him upstairs, as she cleaned the insides, and he blew kisses at her through the glass. He got very sunburned at first, but Mommy rubbed cream into his sore back and shoulders, and in no time, he looked like the Gypsy Rover out of the song, with his black curls and laughing black eyes glowing wickedly in his tanned face. Satya passed things to him as he climbed up and down the long ladder, and he called her his little assistant. He laughed a lot and only had one ice-cold beer at the end of the day.

When they were finished cleaning, lots of people came to the house. They stayed in the bedrooms that were kept closed and draped all winter. Husbands and wives driving down from Canada, sometimes with kids of their own. Young hippies wandering across America, and in need of a proper bed and a bath now that they'd reached the haven of coastal California. Campers rained out of Tomales Bay State Park, or sometimes a family of dark-eyed migrant workers who offered to do a day of odd jobs in return for board, as they travelled to the next farm.

Satya felt very lucky to live in a B&B, where everyone visited, and Mommy and Daddy were really somebody.

Mom was busy all day in the house, cleaning, doing laundry, or preparing the breakfast buffet. Sometimes she taught a yoga class, and Satya was very proud of her, up there at the front of the living room in her flowing white kurta pyjamas. Sometimes Satya helped her make breakfast, just like she helped Daddy fix up the house. Or one or two of the visiting ladies might borrow an apron and pitch in as well, especially if the house was full. Mommy was always thankful. Once Satya even saw her mother sitting at the kitchen table, sniffling quietly and wiping tears away while another lady sat with her over a cup of tea after a long, busy morning.

"I know how hard it is, Laura," said the lady, touching her arm gently, "I've been there myself. _It doesn't have to be that way_. But you do have to reach out for a bit of help."

If Mommy was the goddess of the guest house, Daddy, who was really Michael or Mike, was the god of the sea. He took the guests out in the big yellow ocean kayaks that slid like birds over the water, in between the motor boats and sailboats and windsurfers. He took them fishing - not that there was a lot to catch, in the busy marina of Tomales Bay. And he acted as lifeguard in the early mornings when the sucking undertow was strong and mischievious under the waves.

In the evenings, he played guitar and sang, beside the campfire, just a few feet from the water, while hot-dogs sizzled and marshmallows flared up on whittled skewers of ash and aspen. He played some songs that were beautiful and sad, and then louder, fun ones that everyone seemed to know and sing along with. Mom would play her tambourine or little hand drum, or someone else would bring out another guitar, and everybody sang or hummed along.

Sometimes all the little kids fell asleep among the towels and blankets, or pretended to, for the thrill of being forgotten while the adults sang and told stories over their heads, or the pleasure of being carried inside later. When she went upstairs, Satya could hear them under her bedroom window, laughing and talking quietly together long after she was supposed to be asleep, passing around little cigarettes. She pretended to be fast asleep when Mom and Dad took turns checking on her, holding onto the music as long as she possibly could.

In summer, she didn't have to stay muffled up in jeans and sweaters all the time. It was just that in winter, Dad sometimes forgot how strong he was, and how easily she and Mommy bruised, being so skinny and with their pale skin. He just grabbed her too hard when she got in the way, or picked her up too fast when she tripped. But in summer she never seemed to trip, and never seemed to be in the way.

She could run down to the end of the bobbing wooden tie-up dock in her blue bathing suit and little white water wings, just like the other kids, and take her turn being tossed by the feet, shrieking in dread and delight, into the cold Pacific. Sometimes one of the other parents would take her out in the big, sturdy red rowboat with their own children, and she'd show them around the secret far side of the tiny island, a hundred yards from shore.

In summer, she could pick up left-behind and sea-spat treasures from the beach, each with their own story, and paddle in the ocean that she loved so fiercely and so deeply that she couldn't even tell anyone. She could look back at the house and see Mommy and Daddy on the back porch seat, cuddling each other and waving back at her. And the occasional bruise didn't matter because all the kids had them.

There were hardly any bad days in summer.

In fall, everything started to change. By the end of August, everyone said goodbye and left, with Mommy's raisin banana bread tucked into their bags for the journey. The guest rooms were shut up, and they lived only in the back part of the house. The goddess of the house and the god of the sea went away for winter, and there was just Mommy and Daddy's sadness left. There wasn't anyone else to talk to, and Dad started drinking too much beer or whiskey and smoking too much, and everything made him mad again.

Sometimes Mom drank, too, and they'd start yelling about who was wasting more money and wasting their life. Sometimes when he was really, really upset, and Mom too, they forgot how scary and strong they were. Then nothing could get through the angry haze that seemed to settle over them, and they weren't even Daddy and Mom anymore, yelling and smacking at each other.

Once Daddy even reached out and cuffed her away when she got between them, trying to make them stop. He hadn't even slowed down. Mommy had her eyes closed and hadn't noticed. It was as if she didn't exist, the moment after the back of his hand connected with her cheek. So she just left the kitchen and went to sit on her bed. Daddy came and found her afterwards, when everything was quiet, and rocked her back and forth and said how sorry he was.

They always told each other they were sorry, after they fought, and they hugged and told each other how much they loved each other. Satya could wiggle between them and hug them both again, and they would scoop her up so they could both blow wet noisy kisses on her cheeks to make her laugh. Dad would be cross with himself for drinking again, and Mom would hug him and tell him she was fine, they were all fine. Usually they would be very quiet for a few days afterward, talking a lot in their room, or meditating together, or just working and not saying much.

So Satya, hearing the fight in her parents' room after a week of increasing tension, knew that everything would be okay again soon.

She just had to stay quiet and wait.

* * *

><p><em><strong>First Grade Lessons<strong>_

Only once could Satya remember someone coming to stay at the house who wasn't a paying guest. It was the week before she started school.

Satya was supposed to be in Kindergarten, but she'd skipped over all that to start in Grade One. Just before school started, Mom got a broken arm, from taking down all the curtains to wash, she said. So Daddy's sister Aunt Gloria came to stay, leaving Satya's cousin Charlotte behind with Uncle Ray. Aunt Glo took care of Satya, while Dad anxiously looked after Mom and her arm.

"You don't have to come with me to the bus, you know," Satya had told her aunt, on the very first day of school. Aunt Glo looked at her curiously, and she went on: "I always walk around by myself. I know everyone around here. It's okay if you're too busy."

"Do you mind?" Aunt Glo asked, smiling, "I hardly ever get to spend time with you. I know your Mom wished she could come with you. It's a pretty special day, your first day of school. Whole new world for you."

Satya admitted to herself that she felt a little squirmy, and looked down at her feet.

"No," she said softly, to her new lace-up runners, "It's okay. I kind of like it. It's cool having someone to talk to."

Aunt Glo hugged her around the shoulders, and Satya didn't understand why she looked a little sad behind her smile.

"You can tell me everything that happens in school, when I pick you up later," Aunt Glo said breezily. "Charlotte's daddy will get all of Charlotte's school stories this week, so you can tell me some of yours to make up for it."

Because she was in Grade One, she didn't have to take the little bus that brought the Kindergarteners home at lunchtime. She rode the big yellow bus with everyone else. The girl she sat beside on the way to school, whose name was Mindy, rode with her again. In the morning, they were shy and said nothing to each other, but on the way back, they chattered like a pair of starlings.

Mindy had long thick pale gold braids and blue eyes, and she was short and chubby. Satya was tall and skinny, and had nearly black shortish braids and brown eyes, so they balanced each other out. They could both read already, and Mindy knew lots of math too, since her parents ran a corner grocery store. Mindy had invited her over to play sometime, Satya finished her report, as she and Aunt Glo walked home together after school.

"Do you think Daddy and Mom will let me go?" Satya asked.

"Of course," Aunt Glo replied, "While I'm here, anyway."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, just that I can drive you, while I'm here, so your Daddy won't have to take the time away from your mom. That's all."

The nest day, Mindy sat with another girl, and nobody came to sit with Satya on the bus. She was humiliated and furious, and didn't talk to Mindy all recess. At lunch, Mindy and the other girl came up to her, and said that anyone could sit with anyone and it didn't make any difference to being friends.

Satya maintained her silence, and Mindy walked away, saying: "Well, anyway, I still want _you_to come play."

Aunt Glo was unsympathetic. "Honey, you can't own people. You're there to get to know all the kids in the class, not just each other. She sounds like she still wants to be friends, so why not get a group together and see how much fun you can have?"

Satya was stony-faced and glum. "People shouldn't do that. It's not fair. If you say you're someone's friend, you have to be _their_friend, or you're a liar. A fuckin' stupid bitch liar."

Aunt Glo stopped right in the middle of the street. "Satya! Don't you ever say that again!"

Then she went quiet, because Satya had thrown up her arms over her face and twisted away from her.

Everything went very still. Satya didn't know where to look, but she eventually peered through the space between her arms. Aunt Glo had a look of understanding on her face, as she knelt down on the sidewalk.

"Sweetheart," Aunt Glo said, very softly. "I'm sorry I scared you. I was really shocked, that's all. Those are bad words. Awful words. No little girl should use them."

Satya unwound a little. "I didn't know!" she said, feeling prickly tears starting at the kindness in Aunt Glo's voice.

"I know. You wouldn't have said them if you did. It's fine to be angry and upset, but those are just hateful words."

"But then how come – "

"Mm?"

Satya shook her head, the lingering shock turning her even paler than usual. Aunt Glo reached out her hand, and Satya took it, her little fingers white in a death grip.

_But Mommy and Daddy love each other. I know they do. They say so all the time._

Her feet started to drag and she looked up. "You have to tell Mom and Dad, right? About what I said?"

"No, honey," said Aunt Glo. "I have some more important things to talk to them about. Just try to forget it."

After that, the last week of Aunt Glo's visit was so peaceful Satya never wanted it to end.

She made up with Mindy the next day, and learned that shaking hands was even more important than saying sorry after a fight. She liked that. Anyone could say anything, but shaking hands made it real, somehow. She and Mindy and the other girls all played together every day after that, and true to her word, Aunt Glo took her to Mindy's after school, and picked her up after dinner. Satya had never been to a friend's house for dinner all by herself before, and she tried so hard to be good that Mindy laughed at her. But it was okay, because Mindy's mom laughed at both of them and said that she was glad that Satya had come over.

Dad took great care of Mom, for that last week. He helped her bathe, and carefully washed her long hair over the side of the big white clawfoot bathtub, because her arm was still in a plaster cast. He made her breakfast in bed, and then made sure she was comfortable in the living room or outside on the porch, to catch the last warm days of summer. Satya helped make crazy, fun dinners that they shared sitting on Mom and Dad's big bed together, all four of them.

"Can you tell Daddy you need more help?" she asked her mother, "'Cause I think he likes it. And it's always better when there's people here, right? Maybe Uncle Ray and Charlotte could move in here – there's so much room."

Mom had sort of laughed, and hugged Satya tight with her good arm. But Aunt Glo had left when Mom was back up and working. Mom was okay again, and Aunt Glo missed Charlotte and Uncle Ray.

The winter went back to normal after that, only there were less fights. Satya's spirits rose considerably, and with them, her school grades.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Greater Challenge<em>**

Little feet pounded along the corridors, locker doors slammed, and the chatter of high pitched voices rose above everything. Amazingly, the halls would be virtually silent in a matter of minutes. School was out. There was nothing more important to think about than scrambling down to the beach by any means available, getting sunburns, tummy-aches from ice cream and chips, or bicycling around shady lanes, scrumping apples and peaches from the neighbours' trees.

One small figure dawdled, carefully emptying her locker into her schoolbag. Mrs. McKay checked her watch.

"Satya, won't you miss your bus?"

The child turned. "We have ten minutes extra today, because of all the cleaning up."

"Aha. I forgot about that. But I'm glad you're still here. I wanted to tell you, that's an excellent report card. We think you'd do well in the Enriched program that starts in Second Grade. There's some information in your envelope for your parents, and a slip for them to sign. Good job!"

There was a pause.

"Okay," said Satya, uncertainly.

Mrs. McKay looked at her in some surprise. "You don't have to, dear. But it's a special class that meets three times a week, for students who are ready for more challenge. You'd be working with kids from second to fourth grade, all together. Talk to your parents about it, and send that slip back to the school."

"I don't think," Satya began. She looked out the tall, yellow-framed hall window into the breezy green summer afternoon, and then back at the teacher. Her big dark eyes were guileless and calm as a lake as she said: "I don't think my parents will want to talk today. Can I just say yes? They've been really upset and they don't feel like talking much."

Mrs. McKay took a longer look at the child. Various unpleasant ideas sprang to mind, not the least of which involved the hazy ground between saving a child, and making incorrect student-risk reports to officialdom. The staff had already noticed the quiet five-year-old.

"Never any trouble, quiet as a mouse," said Mrs. Hougham, "Too mousy, if you ask me. Wants shaking up a bit."

But Satya hadn't exhibited any other signs of trouble. She did what she was asked to do, and participated in class just enough to avoid being singled out. She played most often with a few of the quieter girls, unless a group needed a fast runner. Except for her grades, which had risen from strong to significantly interesting as she found her footing, she was inconspicuous in every way.

Now Mrs. McKay realized that Satya had been coached in, or had somehow divined onto her own thin shoulders the necessity of disappearing.

She regarded the child for a moment, and decided to tug a few strings to see what unraveled.

"You know this is good news, right? You haven't done anything wrong – it means you've done a lot of things really well."

The child nodded, and for a fleeting moment, an anxious wrinkle appeared at her brow.

"Is it something that makes you feel shy?" the teacher prodded, "Would you like me or Principal Deluca to call your parents, or invite them here to talk instead?"

Satya thought this over. She shook her head and said, "I don't think they'd come. They're getting the house ready for the summer people, and they're just tired and really upset. That's all."

"Do you know why? Did something happen at home?"

"Nothing happened, not like a big thing. I think they're just not feeling very well. They're going to have to look after all the visitors soon. There's nothing really wrong."

Mrs. McKay was taken aback. _Really upset_, coming twice within thirty seconds, sounded awfully like _constantly fighting_. And _not feeling very well_was hardly an original cover phrase.

She watched Satya push up her sleeve to scratch at a new mosquito bite, and her mind took a lateral leap. Satya had never come to school in short sleeves or with bare legs, even as the California summer grew hot and humid. Students were allowed to wear track suits for PE instead of shorts and t-shirts. The child had always done so, turning up for PE in a little blue and yellow Adidas jogging suit. Mrs. MacKay had assumed that skinny Satya had a high metabolism and needed the insulation.

Now she began to wonder. Surely she was being hypervigilant?

She quickly reviewed her observations. The child had never shown any typically disturbed behaviour. She was perhaps a little too thin, but then she was tall and growing fast, and was always clean and neat, if a little overdressed. She brought a normal lunch and had, if anything, an above-average attention span. While she didn't have a great many friends, she had a few close companions, and got on well with nearly all her classmates.

Her parents, well-spoken young hippie types, had come to each Parent-Teacher Night hand in hand, delighted to hear confirmation of their daughter's intelligence and progress. Perhaps they had seemed a little over eager to please, but then Satya was their firstborn, and it was all new to them.

Satya was also chronically eager to please, visibly downcast when she didn't excel, and quick to defuse or apologize for the slightest confrontation. Which could be the sign of a highly motivated perfectionist, or a desperately anxious child. Surely a child witness to family crisis would show some definite outward sign, before making such matter-of-fact statements about her parents' constant anger?

Unless the child believed it was _not_ a crisis. That everything was normal. Right under the eyes of her highly trained teachers and principal, for the past year. _ "Nothing happened – not like a big thing..." _What, then, was a big thing? Was this a child with a dreadful secret? Or just a young family going through a rough patch?

"I tell you what," Mrs. McKay said, smiling her usual front-of-the-classroom smile, "How about I ask Principal Deluca to call your parents on the phone tonight, after dinner? That way, you can let them know in advance to expect a call about some good news, and they won't have to go anywhere. Would that be okay?"

Satya gave a sideways toothy grin that seemed to thank the teacher for trying, rather than any confidence in the suggestion.

"Okay," she said.

"Better catch that bus, dear. Have a good holiday – you've earned it!"

Mrs. McKay watched the girl walk away, with the sense that she was sending a lamb to slaughter. Unless Satya was equally adept at concealing herself at home, her parents would likely guess that she had revealed something outside of the family. In Mrs. McKay's long experience, troubled families with secrets often had an uncanny sense of when one of their own had broken ranks.

Heading to the Staffroom to collect her things, she decided to enlist a second pair of eyes. She changed course and took the nearest flight of stairs down one level.

"Sylvia," she said, tapping on the door of the Principal's Office, "My little math whiz, the Sidle girl...she'll sit with the school counsellor before starting the Enriched program, right?"

"Sure. All the Enriched kids do, and the Enhanced ones. We have a problem?"

"We may." Mrs. McKay paused. "And I'm quite sure she'll be even more skilled at covering up in September."

Principal Deluca put down her pen. "Tell me everything."

"There may be nothing to tell."

"You're the second teacher to mention Satya this week. There's something to tell."

Mrs. McKay outlined the brief facts at her disposal. "I just hope I'm wrong – or that nothing happens over the summer." she finished.

"Tell me about it. Last week of term always sees an increase in haywire family dynamics. Can't escape from each other over the holidays. And the Sidles do have their hands full with that beach house. It's a tough business. There doesn't seem to be anything so explicit as to warrant getting the ministry to follow up, as you say – just a shy kid and some parental strife – but I'll start a file. And we'll keep an eye on her."

"I just have a feeling."

"I know. We'll get the counsellor's opinion in September. If anything serious is going on, he'll tell us."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Family Mantras<strong>_

Mike dug his hands into his lower back and groaned. It was good to be working again, even if it took him a few days to get used to it, after a sedentary winter.

The workshop floor was covered in small drifts of sawdust. The old rowboat, wobbling precariously on two wooden horses, boasted a new coat of red paint and new varnished pine seats. Every hairline crack and rivet was caulked tight. She'd hold for another season, or maybe two, if the barnacles didn't get her again.

Maybe there'd be time to trace the knocking sound under the truck, if his back held out. He almost relished the pain. It was penance, of a sort. A constant reminder.

But thirst was a different thing. If he was going to work anymore, he needed -

"Mom's doing yoga," Satya announced, standing in the door of Mike's workshop, with a pitcher of iced tea and two plastic cups decorated with large yellow and red flowers, in her hands. "She said to give her some space and see if I could help you."

She set the cups on one end of the long wooden work bench along the wall, and poured them both a drink.

Mike smiled at her, as she handed him a cup, and as often happened to him, felt a wave of wonder at her bright little face, so like his own. There could be no doubt she was his kid. Except for Laura's racehorse frame and determined chin, Satya was all Mike, and she had the brains of both of them combined. How he had produced such a child as Satya was beyond him. Thank the Lord for Laura's softening influence and gentleness.

She had shorts on over her new frilly pink and yellow bathing suit, today, after a week of nearly stifling in long sleeves and jeans in the coastal mid-July humidity, and she didn't have a mark on her precious little body. Mike swallowed hard. He knew his strength too well, and Satya did have a way of testing his patience at the wrong moment, drunk or sober, but no amount of kindness or hard work, no amount of physical pain would let him forgive himself for any bruise and scrape he left on her.

It was one thing for Laura, in the depths of her depressions, to provoke him into making her feel something, _anything_, or for he and Laura to vent on each other. She was tough, and could usually land a punch on him hard enough to make him stop and think, when things got really, crashingly out of hand – but no way in hell should his daughter ever have to deal with that.

Most of the time, well aware of his family demons, he was afraid to speak louder than a murmur around her, or even come too close. But for all those other times...he had to remember not to yell at her, or grab her in impatience when she blundered into his way. He wondered how much she even realized, but he had an uneasy feeling that she didn't miss a thing.

He wondered if she remembered that, in a crescendo of self-hate and bitterness, he had watched her three-year-old self tumble down the uncarpeted back staircase, and _hadn't stopped her._He had only wondered if he'd done it now, the thing that would make it all fall apart, and had decided that if Satya broke her neck he would finally stop fighting, and drink himself steadily and coldly to death. But all that had happened was that Satya got up, rubbed her head where she'd bumped it, and then wailed, snuggling into his chest when he came to comfort her.

She'd had to go for her next doctor visit with black-and-blue knees, and it seemed that every level of governmental child-checking sprang into action. At least they were fair and honest, but he found himself wishing they'd come and checked on him a few times more often when he was a boy with more bruises than Satya ever had.

He didn't tell them that, of course. You didn't admit that you had any lingering childhood resentments, because who knows what you'd pass onto your own child?

He hoped she never found out how close she came to not existing at all. Every single person they knew had freaked out at the news of her impending arrival, and with good reason. Even his big sister Gloria shook her head. Gloria knew the family genie in the bottle better than anyone, after years of fending off, defending and then cleaning up their old man with her own hands when he finally ate his .22. She had lost months of her own life, later on, more than once. And Laura's manic depressive episodes had seen her institutionalized half a dozen times since her teens, when she went more than a few days without sleeping or eating, or started talking in that terrible, flat voice about how awful and worthless she was.

When he and Laura met at a local coffeehouse night, she reading a few poems and he with an endless repertoire of folk and protest music, they understood each other instantly. They recognized one another as fellow wanderers in an unforgiving world. He knew they could save each other the way Gloria and Ray had.

They fought like hell for each other, and then three years later, for Satya, against all odds, against family and friends and shrinks who tried to tell them they were unfit to be parents and dangerous for each other. Here they were, with a brilliant eight year old and a business firmly into the black. Satya was the cement that kept them together. Reminding them to fight one more day against Laura's constant spikes and peaks, and Mike's rages, and the honeyed lull of the bottle, and, when certain guests were generous, the coke...instead of each other.

No, Satya deserved better than that. It was hardly fair to her. Wasn't that the point of setting up the old beach house as a summer bed and breakfast spot - to be a safe, healing space for them over the winters, when they were both at their lowest, and a way to bring the world to them over the summers, instead of having to go out among cold, uncaring strangers to make a living? To get healthy, and give Satya the best chance they could?

And most of the time it worked. He and Laura were hard workers, making up for their bad days by working as fast and well as they could in between, but Satya was just effortlessly smart. She found ways around things before they even happened. Maybe it was just from growing up in the B&B, but she had a knack for remembering the thousands of little details that needed attending to, and seemed to take a personal stake in the business as if it were her own.

And she never fought back, or even shouted at them. He wished she would, sometimes. But she knew better than to get between them when they were drunk or just raging at each other. She knew, because...

He shuddered at the memory.

And if anyone else ever laid a finger on his child...

"Daddy, what?" Satya was staring at him. The look he dreaded most was starting to creep up on her, the closed-up face, the watching eyes, the legs sprung and ready to run.

"Well, now," he said, and drained his iced tea. "Just thinking how I can put you to work. I don't know. This is pretty dirty work, here. Aren't princesses supposed to stay clean and tidy?"

"I'm not a princess! I'm your assistant."

"Well, in that case, how about you put your work shirt on and find out where I left the light on the long yellow cord. Got to get under the truck today. Something's clanking around under there."

"Okay."

Satya grabbed one of Mike's old, discarded shirts off the pegs, with the sleeves rolled back already, and buttoned herself in.

"Daddy?"

"Yup?"

"Is Mom okay?"

Mike looked up from testing the tack of the red paint on the rowboat's hull. "Didn't you just see her?"

"No, I mean...is she sad again? Just 'cause she sort of looked sad today, even though it's summer.'

"Well, you know, grown ups sometimes just get sad. That's probably why she wanted some time to herself to do her yoga."

"Maybe because it's already July and it'll be winter in just a few months? 'Cause she always gets saddest in winter."

Mike wiped his hands on a towel and thought. "You noticed that, huh?"

"Of course I did. I've known her my whole life."

Her retort struck him as hilarious and depressing all at once, and he laughed reflexively.

"Well," he said, "You're right. Winter is hard for Mom. Some people find winter really makes them depressed or sick, and your mom's one of them. In fact, some days are just really hard for her, but winter always makes it worse."

"Why doesn't she ask the doctor, then? Isn't that what they're there for? Don't they have doctors for feelings and things? Kelsey at school goes to one, 'cause her parents got divorced and she was too upset to learn anything."

"Sometimes she does. He tries to help. But you don't talk about family things outside the family, right? We've talked about that. Because there are people who don't understand, and they'd say they were trying to help, but they'd just interfere. Make her take that medicine that slows her down."

_...and then take you away, and lock Laura up with all those violent madwomen and whimpery old ladies pissing the floor, and they might as well lock me up at the same time..._

And dammit, but Mike knew that sensation all too well, the gut-sinking feeling of a good day about to go south. Why did Satya have to ask questions, right when things were going so well? She knew better than that. It wasn't like she was in real danger or anything, but one comment to the wrong person, one bruise that looked too much like a man's hand on her arm, and there'd be a Child Welfare inquisition, with everything out in the open and probably in all the local papers. End of story.

"We should make her feel better ourselves then, huh?" Satya said quickly, moving out of reach across the shop. She made a show of looking for the work-light. "What can we do, Dad?"

Mike played along. "Yeah. Maybe we'll have a campfire on the beach tonight, while it's just us here. Maybe we'll do a cookout dinner and practice some music. Get in tune before the guests start to come. You think she'd like that?"

Satya nodded expressionlessly. She didn't ask the question he knew she was chewing over.

_If winter is Mom's reason for being so messed up, what's yours?_

"She's okay, though," she said, seriously, "Right, Dad?"

"Of course she's okay," said Mike.

* * *

><p><em><strong>The Queen of Shifting Worlds<strong>_

Laura sat cross-legged in the little dove-gray bedroom she used to meditate, when it was empty, and breathed deeply. She listened to Satya's happy shrieking as Mike chased her up onto the back porch with the garden sprayer.

That was something good, at least. By now, Satya had a sixth sense about their states of mind. She wouldn't be playing with Mike if he wasn't okay.

She knew it was happening again. She'd been expecting it, after the last few months of sharp clarity and the buzzing, beginning-of-the-season energy that woke her by four in the morning, and kept her going without rest and barely any food all day.

Not today, though, or yesterday. It was all she could do to pull herself together to get dressed and downstairs, and by lunchtime today, she knew what was happening. This time, at least, she was fully aware of the process, the smothering gray blanket tightening around her mind, her thoughts, until even her senses were dulled, until it seemed that her heart was too tired and heavy to beat anymore. It was a place she knew well. Sometimes she woke up to find herself there all at once, as if blown from her bed and dropped into a dry desert in her sleep. Sometimes it came slowly, and she existed with one foot in either world for months at a time.

And when it got really bad, there were the white walls and the candy-coated pills, the cranky nurses telling her she was a bad girl if she didn't shit on schedule, or making up lies to put in their reports. They didn't think people like her should be out in the real world. She knew she couldn't ever get well, surrounded by stark white walls and staff whose expressions ranged from timid to grim depending on their years of experience. And the drugs they forced into everyone made her feel like a zombie, all the pukers and slashers and schizos and the occasional rich brat sent to be fixed by confused parents who couldn't understand why their daughter was just so _difficult_, standing waiting outside the Dispensary in a surreal shivery pink-hospital-gowned line at 5 a.m.

So she learned to tell them exactly what they wanted to hear, and give them no reason at all to keep her, even if she knew she was worse than when she first went in.

Which was why she and Mike had created their own world, their haven, a safe place to just be themselves, unwanted and imperfect, as they were so often told, to do the best they could. Mostly it worked. She could hardly grudge Mike the occasional drunken bender after what she put him through, when she was down. He was such a wonderful father when she couldn't even handle the thought of being herself. As long as they took turns, they joked sometimes, it would all work out.

And it did work, even if they could never have explained it or justified it to anyone but Gloria, who knew everything anyway.

Already she could tell this was going to be a long, slow slide down and climb back out, instead of a rapid dive and buoyant recovery. If she was lucky she wouldn't hit the bottom. She had plenty of work to do, which was always a help. Something to get her back up against and force herself into action, especially since her daughter was as independent an eight year old as she'd ever seen, and didn't need to have much done for her anymore.

_And whose fault is that, anyway? She's been parenting herself since she could toddle._

She'd held the cloudy descent at bay for most of the winter, except for those two lost weeks in December. Why couldn't she have let it hit then, one big earthquake during the off-season, instead of the prospect of an entire summer of dragging herself through the interminable sucking swamp?

She couldn't ask the doctor to increase her meds, not without setting off alarms. It was a compromise, even going on them. She hated them, hated the fuzzymindedness and the general numbness that they brought, knowing that she wasn't herself. Wasn't the creative, passionate young woman Mike had fallen in love with ten years ago.

Instead, she monitored mind and body with regular Hatha Yoga and delving deep into eastern ego-unveiling philosophy, and took the minimum dose of lithium that kept the very worst of the swings at bay, and Mike waged his desperate war against the bottle all by himself. He occasionally borrowed a handful of her Prozac during the roughest times, and they learned to rely on each other alone. They read everything they could find about recovery, from first-person accounts to spiritual advice, and practiced yoga, and practiced being peaceful people trapped in a wartorn internal country.

It had been years since any social worker had called, not since Satya had had to go to her regular annual checkup with a perfectly ordinary set of bruises on her three-year-old knees after tumbling down the back stairs. There had been a full investigation, and only after thoroughly trouncing each and every suggestion of violence or neglect had they been left alone. They weren't going through that again. There would be no second chances for a couple like them, however innocent the circumstances. Once they had Satya, they'd never let her come home.

So they had to be kept away by any means necessary. They were just waiting for an excuse to land on them for a home visit, and as clean and healthy as her house and her child were, as soon as they were in the door, they'd find some reason to take Satya away with them.

She knew it. They hadn't wanted her to have Satya at all.

What chance did they think they had, they asked her, when she told them she was expecting. They talked about the weeks and months she'd lost as a teenager and as a young woman, and her occasional institutional committals. They talked about the heavy-duty antidepressants they put her on from the time she was thirteen, and how likely it was that her daughter would be born damaged. They talked about the hundreds of families just desperate for a child to love and raise in their perfect, functional, fashionable homes in which everything matched, and how relentlessly tiring a baby's needs were even for a completely stable mother. They talked about Mike's booze-soaked history, his stints on probation for petty crimes in his youth, and his violent father's eventual suicide, and demanded to know how she could expect any better of her husband? And their child?

For the first three months, she smiled and nodded and told them she'd think about it. After that, they seemed to give up, seeing that she and Mike were completely clean and stable, and that the business was doing well. She felt the looks, though, and imagined their grave consultations after they left the office, debating how best to wrest that child away from that incompetent couple who should never have been allowed to breed in the first place. Sterilize the lot of them, drug them up and keep them apart from the normal world.

She would give them not a single reason to take her baby that any judge in the land would accept. She was a model of pre-natal care and preparation, and finally her reward came when her doctor grudgingly admitted that he didn't think any community-care visits would be necessary if they kept on track.

And then Satya was born. Her reluctant tiny girl was finally coaxed into the world, slippery and squalling in the doctor's gloved hands.

"Feisty," said the doctor, approvingly, "Just give us a minute to clean her up and weigh her."

Laura watched the doctor's back and listened to the sweet music of her daughter's angry bellowing, and pushed when the delivery nurse told her to push to expel the afterbirth. She'd followed all their instructions through the long but uneventful delivery, and been as quiet as she could, to give them no reason to think she was in an overexcited state.

She wished Mike was there, but Mike had gotten faint when things got serious around the twentieth hour, and had been led outside into the corridor to pace with another sweating father to be. The white-gowned staff had eyed one another over Laura's swollen belly as he left. They hadn't wanted Mike there anyway, she thought. She knew there was a Manic Depressive Crazy Lady notation in big letters somewhere on her chart. This way, the nurses could treat her like some troublesome kid who'd gotten herself knocked up, and not a married twenty-three year old at the end of a decidedly planned pregnancy.

_Think of the baby,_they all urged her. Why did they think that would make her give her up? Of course she was thinking of the baby. Thinking of the baby was what got her through.

_My little fighter. You're the spark that kept us going. I'm not letting you down._

The doctor's nurse aproached with Satya, sturdy, swaddled and howling, and finally laid her in Laura's arms. Laura got her first clear sight of her daughter, red-faced and perfect, with Mike's dark curls stuck to her brow.

"Satya," she murmured. "Satya Narayan."

Though she must have only appeared to be a pale fuzzy blob to the baby, Satya stared straight into her eyes, and settled down immediately.

"Well," said Laura, to the baby, "Hi, sweetheart. May your life be filled with peace." She looked up at the masked faces hovering over her, "Can someone tell my husband we're both fine?"

With a grin, the doctor's nurse strode to the door and flung it open. "Mr. Sidle!" she called. "Your family wants you."

_Oh, God, if you only knew how much we want you_, Laura thought, floating through the thick warm mist of memory back to her draggy, exhausted self. She listened to Satya, healthy, smart and full of sass, singing bits of Supertramp as she clattered up the stairs to her room. _We need the real you, not the drunken angry you. That's not you. Narayana, look out for my daughter, who is your daughter, too. Please, please, God, Buddha, Quan Yin, anyone who's listening out there...help my husband stay away from the bottle while I'm like this, because I need him, and our daughter needs her daddy._

We can do this. We just need each other. We'll be okay.

I hope.

Because this is going

to be

a bad one.


	5. Doorways

**Chapter Five:**  
>Doorways<p>

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Notes<strong>

There are about eight individuals' stories knitted into this segment, some of whom made it, and some of whom didn't.

This chapter is dedicated to all those who sought help on account of their kids, and the kids who were their parents' saving graces and inspiration. To the Greta Neals of the world, be they official foster parents or unofficial safe adults. To the emergency workers and police who rescue the living and speak for the dead. And a fervent prayer that all those who fall through the cracks be found, scooped up and embraced and made whole.

For those of you who remember the movie-watching "therapy" scene in Kubrick's _A Clockwork Orange_, you have some idea of what it was like to write this chapter. At the same time, there are so many voices begging to have their stories told, after years of strict confidential silence, and it's a deep relief to be able to do so in this fashion.

Thank you for reading. Go and wrap your arms around someone you love, and tell them why.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Bonesetting<em>**

It was the middle of the afternoon. She was still doped up on painkillers. Daddy was there, and last night was just a nightmare best forgotten.

"I'm so sorry, so sorry..." Daddy said.

He held her good hand, and stroked her forehead as she lay in the tilting bed. Her left arm ached abominably, despite the medication, and sleep was tugging at her, but at least the pain kept her from drifting away while Daddy was there.

It was funny in a way, what a relief it was to have Daddy beside her, stone-sober and so gentle now. She guessed they didn't know he had done it, or they wouldn't have let him visit. But that was okay. She wanted him there. Mom wouldn't have let him anywhere near if he wasn't himself. And anyway, people would probably ask questions if Daddy didn't come to see her.

"I know," she whispered. "S'okay."

"I never meant to do anything to hurt you," he said, low enough that the other little girl in the ward couldn't hear. "Any of it. I don't know why...things just got really out of hand. I know you were just trying to stop us...fighting like that. I'm going to do better. Whatever it takes. I promise you."

She nodded carefully. She'd heard this before. "I know. Where's Mom?"

"She's down in the cafeteria, getting something to eat."

"How long can you stay?"

"As long as you want, honey. You want me to read to you or something?"

She nodded again. "I'm not supposed to try to read yet. Can't hold a book, anyway." She glanced down at the blue fiberglass cast that went from just below her elbow to halfway down her fingers. "Did you know they screwed my wrist back together?" she went on, interestedly. "I didn't know they could do that. The doctor said that made me like The Bionic Woman."

Daddy's face actually went pale. "Ah, well," he said, and cleared his throat. "The doctors know what they're doing. What do you want me to read? Looks like you've got _The Secret Garden_, _Misty and Sea Star_ or _Moby Dick_" He looked at her. "_Moby Dick_? Isn't that a little old for you?"

"Nope. Mommy and I read a bit every day. I want that one."

"Your choice." He plucked the book from the small white shelf beside the bed, and opened it to the marked page. He stared at it for a moment. "Hey, listen."

He swallowed, paused, and Satya looked up at him.

"I was scared to death last night. Not just the...I mean, a concussion, honey, that's really serious. I swear to you, I'm never going to do anything that might hurt that head of yours. See, honey, your mom and I...we've had to work really hard just to get through every day, sometimes. But you, you got every chance in the world. You're the smartest kid I ever knew. You gotta get to college, do something really special with your life. So...I'm gonna try to get better, and you get better, and we'll help each other. Okay?"

"Okay," said Satya.

"There's a kind of club," Daddy went on. He took a deep breath. "It's a - it's a group that helps people stop drinking, for good. I'm gonna start going. I've been thinking about it for a long time, but last night was...that can't ever happen again, ever. To you or Mom."

Satya stared. This sounded serious. Daddy, telling other people about getting drunk?

"Baby, I don't even know how I can ask you. But I'm going to need help, from you and Mom. It's too much for one person to get through alone. Can you help remind me that I promised never to drink again? And don't let me forget why."

Satya blinked at him, sleepy under the heavy veil of painkillers. She nodded, and squeezed his hand. If Daddy said he needed her help, there was nothing she wouldn't do.

"Okay," Daddy said, almost to himself. "Okay...Well, now. Where did you get to?" He opened the book again. "Now these three mates-Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous men..."

_My daddy is a momentous man,_thought Satya.

_When he's not drunk._

* * *

><p><strong><em>Breaking<em>**

Summer had started so well. Even though Mike was a bastard to be around some days, and was smoking again, he'd only fallen off the wagon twice since landing Satya in hospital. Satya herself was visibly glowing after reading her teacher's comments on her fifth grade performance, and was keen to get into the workshed and the water again after six weeks' enforced banishment while her wrist healed.

It should have been the realization of the dream they had spent years talking about. Mike sober, Laura on a minimal dose of the Lithium Carbonate, Satya being amazing, and the business thriving.

Laura knew she was hovering on the edge of a crash. Sometimes a temporary Prozac boost was necessary to keep the wolves at bay. Mixed with the Lithium, it made her head feel like small sparks were going off inside her skull for a day or two, and oddly, her perception of space seemed to be skewed, but it did help, if only because she stopped caring so much about what was real and what wasn't.

She was frightened of what was happening to her and Mike, and couldn't talk about it, which manifested in a continuous dull anger. She felt like she didn't know herself anymore. And she didn't know this new Mike, either. They were once united against the world. Now, though he was almost completely sober, he'd gotten nasty. When he hit her, he didn't cry or apologize. He snarled. Satya was avoiding him, in recent days, after he smacked her butt so hard that he knocked her off her feet, for some cheekiness he took for attitude.

Laura had flashes of him laying down an ultimatum and sending her back to hospital, with the threat of walking out and taking Satya away from her. How would he not? Though nobody talked about it, she knew that they all knew she was getting sicker, and he was getting just mean enough to pull something like that.

_...or was she just paranoid and imagining it? She couldn't tell anymore_.

She'd started lashing back at him, usually on a Sunday evening when most of the guests were gone.

Sibilant, hushed arguments turned physical. She stopped hitting with an open hand and she left deep black knuckle bruises, and once split his lip. There was a savage satisfaction in the violence he returned, as if she knew she could control him by making him lose control - or at least join her in feeling out of control. Over the last few weeks, he'd looked like he was afraid of her. She almost relished it.

In the end, there was no real trigger, and it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

It was just another interminable, sleepless summer night. Laura had barely slept in a week. There were no guests booked for a few days, and they were all relieved, grateful for a chance to catch up on chores and not be on public display to strangers, for a time. Satya had gone to bed hours before, and she and Mike were alone with only each other for company.

They were both tired, but neither wanted to sleep near the other, and neither would capitulate and seek out any of the twelve other beds in the house. At length, Mike started talking in his most reasonable voice, saying that they both needed sleep and weren't going to solve anything by sitting across from each other all night. Why didn't they just call it a night and talk in the morning?

If he'd snarled, if he'd ordered her to get in the fucking bed and go to sleep, she might have snarled back and done so. But Mike being so quiet and calm raised her hackles. What was he thinking? What was he planning? Why did he suddenly want to sleep in the same bed with her? Why wouldn't he just leave her alone?

So she asked: "Why the hell don't you just leave me alone?"

"Because you're my wife and I love you. I don't know what the hell's wrong with us. I thought we were getting better. I'm worried about you."

"Oh, you're Mr. Clean-and-Sober now, and I'm the nutcase? Let me tell you, you were a lot easier to live with drunk than like this."

"You think it's easy?" he said, for the hundredth or thousandth time that summer. "You need your meds, and that's fine, that's a totally different thing, but I was killing myself. And - "

"You could've fucking killed _her_, you asshole!"

She went at him, hard-fisted.

He stood still, as if deciding whether to even respond, and then tried to grapple her arms immobile, without even trying to answer. This infuriated her. It made him the virtuous victim and her the lunatic bitch.

"Going...to wake Satya..." he muttered through gritted teeth, struggling to keep her still. He pinned one of her arms against him and tried to break her balance. She stopped punching and started scratching. Why wasn't he fighting back? This deep sadness in him terrified her. Made her think he had finally come to the end of the road and was about to do something drastic.

"Fuck _you!_The hell you care!"

She went wild, flailing and reaching for any part of him she could. He tried to back away from her, to get to the door. He had his hand on the knob. The door slammed open, loud in the dark hallway, and they staggered out together, still grappling. He was finally fighting her. It felt hellishly good. Familiar release. She'd finally gotten through to him, even if he was still holding back, looking for a way out. He was trying to keep her against the wall, so he could get past her and into another room.

In some barely-lit recess of Laura's mind, she knew he was only trying to get behind the closest door he could. That it happened to be Satya's flipped a switch.

_Satya's room. He was about to open the door to Satya's room. He was going to take her child away. Nobody would ever believe a crazy woman saying that her child wasn't safe with her own father._

She wrenched her arm free and reached out wildly for the first thing she could find on the hall table. A pen or a bunch of dried flowers, it didn't matter.

It was a letter opener, thin and solidly made.

From the moment Laura drove it upwards under his ribs with the force of all her body weight, she was gone. Snapped. There was no moment of suspended disbelief. He had no time to look into her eyes or to reach out. His lung perforated, he grunted in surprise and shock, and buckled, sliding down till his legs kicked and he looked like he was just sitting against the wall.

She followed him down. Release lent superhuman strength to her arms. She barely noticed the thick blood gushing from his mouth, from around the blade, as she pulled out the instrument and drove it in again, this time severing the pulmonary artery, the next nicking the tough pericardium. His eyes glazed after the second stab, and he was probably dead before the fourth. She didn't notice. Panting and crying in high gasps, she plunged the blade again and again, sloppily, her fingers slipping on the blood-slick handle. The metal tip bounced and skidded off his breastplate and ribs, and finally snapped off. In childlike frustration she stabbed with the jagged edge.

Finally, spent, she collapsed in tears. She fell heavily on the floor beside him and pushed at his shoulder, weeping, terrified.

"Mike, get up, please, God, Mike, wake up...Mike?"

He slumped away from her, eyes staring, blood streaming from the corners of his mouth. He slid down along the wall till he lay on his side, leaving shiny crimson streaks on the wallpaper.

As Laura doubled over her husband, and saw what she had done, she clutched his bloody, torn shirt in her hands and screamed, dragging in breath after breath of the reek of sour copper and excrement that began to leach from him, and screaming again.

She would never be done.

* * *

><p><strong><em>No Time for Goodbye<em>**

It was just after two o'clock in the morning, by Satya's bedside clock. She was wide awake, with her bedside light on, but nobody had noticed. Tucked up in bed, she frowned and tried to concentrate on Hercule Poirot.

At least her parents were being mostly quiet, although from the scuffles and thumps in the next room, Satya knew it was intensely physical, and not in the least amorous. Unable to focus on her book, she got out of bed and began pacing at random, wondering how long it would be until they gave up.

Things were getting worse instead of better. There used to be a lot of yelling and occasional punches thrown, but nothing like these deadly serious fistfights that only ended in a draw from exhaustion.

When her parent's bedroom door crashed open, she nearly jumped out of her skin. The house shook with the weight of two fully grown adults slammed up against the wall. Satya, now with one hand tensed on the handle of her bedroom door, heard dull blows, her mother's high sobbing gasps of exertion, and then finally, silence.

Then she heard the screams.

She yanked open the door. Laura, keening and rocking, blocked Satya's line of sight to her father. So she saw only that he was sprawled on the ground behind Laura, and blood spreading over the floor.

She didn't see his face, or his shredded and bloodied front. Years later, she would realize how lucky she was. One more second, and she would have seen it all.

"_Oh, my God!_I'll call the ambulance, Mom, okay?"

She felt like she might be sick, but she turned and sprinted down the stairs to the kitchen. She grabbed the phone and dialed 911.

"My dad's really hurt," she managed to say. "I think they were fighting."

The 911 operator kept her talking. She could hear Laura wailing upstairs, begging Mike to get up. She wanted to run upstairs and see, but the operator made her stay on the line, asking her questions, until she heard sirens growing louder outside, finally cutting off with a dreadful finality right outside.

Satya managed to wobble to the front door, holding onto the wall because her knees somehow didn't want to work. She heard a heavy knock on the door, and dragged it open. Three ambulance men stood there, and two police cars were coming up the driveway.

"Are you Satya?" one of the ambulance men asked. She nodded and they came clambering into the house, carrying an oxygen tank and a stretcher on wheels.

"Daddy's upstairs," she said gulping back sobs. "It's this way."

It was horrible, being seen in her pyjamas by these strange men, and knowing they were going to see everything Mom and Dad hadn't wanted anyone to see.

They left the stretcher downstairs and hauled the heavy oxygen tank behind them. They followed her through the kitchen and up the stairs. Just as she got halfway, the front door crashed open again, and a uniformed policeman came pelting down the hall.

"Wait! Still in progress. Get her outta here."

A heavy hand gripped her shoulder. "Whoa, whoa."

The ambulance man stepped aside, pulling her with him, to let two policemen go up the stairs ahead of them. The first one had his hand on the grip of his gun.

By reflex, Satya looked towards her mother, whose head and shoulders she could see over the top of the stairs. Laura was still rocking back and forth and moaning.

In the policemens' flashlight beams, Satya saw curved, drippy splashes of blood high on the walls and on her parents' bedroom door, and her own, and her eyes widened.

"Oh, fuck, man." said one of the ambulance men, in a low voice.

She stopped feeling sick and panicky, and felt nothing but a boundless fury at being so powerless, at her parents, at the noisy ambulance men and the police with their scary guns invading her house and seeing her parents at their worst, and the mess that would have to be cleaned up before the next guests came.

As the first ambulance man turned her around, she beat at him with her fists.

"Let me _go,_ I want my daddy,_ I want my daddy_!"

The ambulance man simply lifted her off her feet and passed her to a gray-haired police officer with a moustache, who was at the foot of the stairs. He bore her downwards so she had to sit on the step, and he held onto her elbows so she couldn't move.

"It's okay, kid. It's okay. Ease up. Let us help your daddy. We gotta get you out of here. I'm going to take you somewhere safe."

Satya stopped struggling and stared at him, starting to cry in earnest.

The moustached policeman carried her like an infant into the lace-curtained, potpourri-smelling front room that seemed bizarrely normal and untouched, and set her on her feet. She got up onto the couch and pulled the knitted blanket off the back, wrapping herself up as tight and small as she could, hiding her face in the soft folds.

The house seemed suddenly full of people. She heard more footsteps, and voices, some from the men crowding the front hallway, and some crackling from radios, all at once.

"...manic-depressive. Repeated committals, most recently in 1965. Tango-Four-One and Echo-Two-Six, status update? Over."

"...Services to remove one female child to overnight emerg care, would you? Thanks."

Then from upstairs:

"Confirmed Sierra-Delta, suspicious. Coroner and CSI requested. Repeat: confirmed Sierra-Delta, over."

Everything seemed to go quiet. Satya looked around, wondering what had happened. The older officer, who was just about to say something to her, looked alarmed, and started to move to shut the door. Then they heard the sound of retching from upstairs.

"Hansen, toilet's thataway." she heard.

"Aw, sorry, Cap. Augh."

"'S'all right." said the captain, "Worry when it _doesn't_make you hurl. Hey, Pete! Bring the Vicks. It's pretty rank."

Another voice said: "Scene cleared. One female in custody, coming out now. Someone throw a tarp over my back seat?"

The moustached officer shook his head bleakly and pulled the door half-closed, trying to listen at the same time. "We're going to get you out of here as soon as we can."

Laura was led past the doorway, wrapped in a gray wool ambulance blanket over her bloody jeans and blouse. She was crying and stumbling. As she looked into the front room, she saw Satya, and grabbed onto the door handle. Two grim-faced policemen held onto her arms and tried to hurry her along.

_"Satya, sweetheart...I love you, baby. Don't let them...don't let them take you away..."_

"Mommy!" Satya called. Or thought she did. No sound came out of her mouth, as if she was trapped in a bad dream. And maybe it was a bad dream? Laura didn't look anything like Mommy, anymore. She looked like a stranger, nothing like the Mommy who had tucked her in just a few hours earlier. Her hair hung in sticky, rusty strands around her blood-smeared face, and her hands, held in front of her by metal handcuffs, were red and slimy against the rough gray blanket. Her soft moccasin slippers left a trail of sticky footprints as she walked.

Satya gaped as Laura vanished from sight and was taken out of the house.

_This is a nightmare. It has to be._

Then she leaned over the side of the couch and threw up her dinner over and over into the firewood basket.

Moustache sighed and came over to hold her shoulders, and then mopped at her with his handkerchief. A young cop, still a little green under his freckles, poked his head in the room. "Coroner's here, sir. Dispatch had him on standby already." The older cop nodded.

"Child Services on their way?" he asked tiredly. "This is a total cluster. Should've taken her straight to the station house and gotten her picked up from there, screw policy."

"Twenty minutes or so. They were about to take her to a shelter in San Fran, but I think they found someone local. You go, sir, I'm good to babysit," he said, with a wry attempt at humour.

Moustache nodded and left the room, and Freckle-face stepped inside. He closed the door behind him, so Satya couldn't see into the hall any more.

"Kid, I'm sorry, but everything happened real fast here. We'd have gotten you out right away if we knew it was gonna be like this. Someone's gonna come collect you. I'll stay with you till then, okay? I'm Officer Hansen. Call me Craig, if you want."

Satya stared at him. His words passed right over her head. He sighed, and sat down on the couch beside her, rolling his cap in his hands.

"Looks like we had the same reaction, huh? No wonder. You're Satya, right?"

Satya nodded.

She closed her eyes and sat sideways in the corner of the couch. She lost track of time, but the footsteps and voices upstairs and in the hallway seemed to go on forever.

A new voice, a lady's, authoritative and a little angry.

"Alone with a male officer in a closed room? Whose brilliant idea...?"

More low voices. Then the lady again: "Then hire some. What about all this? Can it be covered up? No way she should see that."

More voices, chastened.

"She saw her like that? _While someone was watching her?_Oh, good Lord, you guys. Did you even...tell the Captain I'm calling him tomorrow."

The door opened. Satya opened her eyes. Freckle-face got to his feet and put his cap back on. A lady in a blue pantsuit stood pointing to the floor, where two policemen were spreading out silver ambulance blankets so they covered up the bloody footprints.

Satisfied, the lady came into the front room. She was carrying Satya's school coat and rain boots from the front hall closet. She looked strict, but nice. She crouched down in front of Satya.

"Satya? Hi, there. I'm sure this is all confusing and scary. But I'm here to help you. Okay? We should go now. I've made some overnight arrangements for you. Can you walk?"

Satya uncurled her legs and struggled to her feet. She thought the lady was silly to ask her that, but then she felt a strange warm weakness in her knees, and had to sit down again. The lady nodded.

"It's perfectly all right, dear. It's normal. Just breathe deeply, and let's get you out of here. Will you let me help you?"

She reached out an arm around Satya's waist, blanket and all, and bundled her coat over everything. Satya held onto her shoulder and stepped into her boots, which felt very odd in pyjamas and without socks, but no stranger than anything else on this night.

She was aware that the lady was checking her out for blood or bruises and things.

"You're not hurt at all? Did you get shoved, or pushed around or anything? Did anyone touch you in a bad way?"

She shook her head.

The lady led her outside to a small brown station wagon parked right by the front door, and helped Satya inside. When Satya was buckled in, the lady crouched down beside the open car door and took her hand.

"Satya, honey. I want you to listen to me. This is a very rare and awful thing that's happened, and it's going to seem like you landed on a different planet for a while. So hold onto this: _You did nothing wrong. You did everything right._"

Satya said nothing, but she held the lady's hand a little tighter.

_But Mom and Dad fight all the time. Everything was normal. Except Dad got cut really badly or something. All that blood..._

If I didn't do anything wrong, then why do I keep thinking of things I could have done?

Why didn't I call 911 sooner?

Why didn't I know how bad things really were? Why did they always tell me they were okay?

Why didn't I warn Daddy that Mom was really bad today, and not to upset her?

Why didn't I fake sick or something, so they'd take me to the doctor, and I could tell him Mom needed more medicine?

What happens to me now? Do I still get to live here?

Will Aunt Glo and Uncle Ray come live here, and take care of Mom and Dad? There's plenty of room. Charlotte and I could each have our own room and go to school together.

It would be fun to have a sister...I could show her how to paddle a kayak and we could take piano lessons...

Her arms and legs jerked, and she realized her eyes had drifted shut and she was almost dozing off, right there in the car. How could that happen? She had to stay awake and pay attention.

"She's exhausted," said the lady to someone behind her, "and probably in shock. Nature's sedative. And it's nearly four o'clock. Could one of you take a look at her while she's here? I don't want her sitting in an ambulance unless it's necessary."

"Of course not," said one of the ambulance attendants, in a low voice. "I'll be right there."

Satya had a dim impression of gentle hands checking her pulse, gently thumbing her eyes open, feeling her hands and forehead, and the blanket being wrapped around her again. She curled up within its folds and closed her eyes.

"Definitely shock, but not bad. Only to be expected. Just keep her warm and quiet, and try to get some glucose into her. If she gets the shakes or chills, I'd bring her to the ER. No sign of trauma on her?"

"No, none. Marin County Dispatch said she just ran and called 911, and didn't see much."

"Thank God."

"She'll have a full workup tomorrow, I'm sure."

Satya tried not to hear anything around her. If she could just be nothing for a little while, she could wake up in her own bed, after a deep, warm nap. Then she could sit with Mom out on the sunny back porch seat, and lean against her sweet-smelling warmth and tell her all about the nightmare she'd had.

She woke up when the car stopped. She was leaning against the lady in the blue pantsuit.

"Satya? We're here, honey. Time to wake up."

"Do I have to?" she asked, hating how sulky she sounded.

"Yes, dear. Come on, now."

The car door opened and the lady stepped out, reaching in to help her.

"Where are we?" Satya asked. She climbed out, feeling stupid and slow, and reached for the coat she'd thrown off in her sleep. They had pulled up in front of a white bungalow on a street filled with small shingled or stucco houses, and mountain ash trees all up and down the boulevard. Some of the houses and yards looked tidy and well kept, while others were a tangle of overgrown lawns and unclipped hedges and tumbledown garages.

The house in front of her was very clean and neat looking, in the artificial twilight of a well-lit city street. Low red rose-bushes lined a quartz-chip path, with round cinderblock stepping-stones set among them. The front yard looked just trimmed, and the house had a small red tile porch that matched the colour of the tiles on the roof. The two front windows, one on either side of the door, were curtained in what looked like a misty green fabric, and an elderly lady was waving from one of the windows.

"You're going to be staying here a little while, with Mrs. Neal."

"But I didn't bring anything." she mumbled, almost to herself, as the lady herded her up the path. "I couldn't go upstairs."

"I'm going to collect some of your things. You can tell me what you want especially, and I'll try to find it."

The front door opened, and Mrs. Neal stood smiling at her. "Hello, dear."

Satya stood on the porch. She looked at plump, grandmotherly-looking Mrs. Neal, in a quilted housecoat and slippers, and through the doorway, into the tidy little house.

For the first time, she realized she wasn't going home. This was everything her parents had warned her about. This was what they had fought so hard to stop from happening. And Satya hadn't been able to help them after all.

Gripping the social worker's hand, she stepped through the door.

She didn't need to be told to take off her boots. It was that sort of house. Inside, there was a small living room with a matching floral-print couch and chairs, a television on a cart with a swivel tray, a fireplace with a white brick hearth and mantel, and a few small tables with knitting or books or lamps upon matching lace covers. Two dark wood bookcases stood either side of a big double-door that led into a dining room.

"Have a seat, Satya," said Mrs. Neal. She gestured to the couch, and sat across from them in a chair. The lady sat on the couch, and tugged Satya along with her.

"We thought you'd be comfortable here for a while," the lady said. "Your aunt and uncle are only a few minutes' drive away. You'll get to see them soon. In the meantime, Mrs. Neal will take good care of you."

Satya hung on to the social worker and felt like crying again, frightened for both her parents, ashamed for their humiliation at having the world know they weren't okay, and her own failure to stop it. And the embarrassment of turning up at such a nice old lady's house in the middle of the night, dressed like she was.

"I didn't have time to bring anything," Satya said apologetically. "But maybe I could borrow something from my cousin Charlotte tomorrow, if Mom and Dad are still in hospital? I've done that before, when I stayed there. I'm as tall as Charlotte."

The lady and Mrs. Neal looked at one another.

"Well, you're going to be meeting with some other people tomorrow," said the lady. "I'm going to go right back and collect some of your things."

"Meeting with who?"

"A police detective, and a doctor, and some people who want to get to know you so they can help you."

"I don't need help." Satya heard herself say, "I should go home. Mom's got all that cleaning to do, and I always help her."

"Your Mom will be in hospital for a while, dear." Mrs. Neal said kindly, "Someone else will do the cleaning. Don't worry about it."

The dreamlike state was taking over again. The room was warm and stuffy, and the faces seemed to float, larger than life, in front of her. She blinked and tried to clear her vision, but the softness of the couch and the warm press of the lady's arm around her were making her drowsy again.

"What about Dad? Why does Mom have to stay in hospital?" she asked in a whisper, her eyelids closing. "Dad's the one who got hurt. She really hurt him. I didn't know she could fight like that. He was bleeding pretty bad. I guess she was really mad at him. Is Dad in hospital too? Do they know Mom needs her medicine?"

"I think we better just let her sleep." the lady murmured to Mrs. Neal. "Can you help her to bed? I'll run back to the house and see if they'll let me upstairs yet. She'll feel a little less adrift with some familiar things around her."

Later, she realized with some surprise that she'd never felt scared for herself. She'd been passed from hand to hand so seamlessly, that it didn't occur to her to wonder if she would be taken care of.

She let herself be led down a corridor that seemed endless.

_Nothing_looked familiar, when Satya woke up, except her school bag, and a brown leather suitcase that belonged to her mother. These stood side by side inside the door. The room was painted pale yellow and white, with yellow curtains at the window. She was still in her pyjamas, which thankfully she hadn't puked on, in a strange bed with plain white bedclothes. There was a white chest of drawers and a matching set of bookshelves, and her school coat and jean jacket hung were hanging in the built-in closet.

_What the hell?_

She sat up in shock and looked around.

_Mrs. Neal's house. Mom and Dad had a bad fight, and they're in hospital. I'm just staying here till...I don't know when._

I've got to talk to Aunt Glo and Uncle Ray.

And I've got to brush my teeth. Eugh.

She swung her legs out of bed, and was glad to find them steady. She lifted the suitcase onto the bed and opened it up. The social worker lady had done a good job picking out the things she needed the most. Clothes, a few books that were in her room, and, thank heavens, a plastic baggie with a new travel-size toothbrush, toothpaste, and some hair things. That was nice of the lady.

She began to change out of her pyjamas. Looking down, she realized that Mrs. Neal would have seen the shiny-red scars from where they put the tiny screws in her left wrist.

_Shit, she's going to think...I know what she's going to think, and she's wrong. It wasn't like that. It was never like that. It was just an accident. He was just drunk and wasn't thinking straight. He'd never want to hurt me._

She finished changing into an embroidered green cotton kurti and a pair of denim overalls, and ran her fingers through her hair. Then she picked up the bag of toiletries, stared around the room for a moment, trying to take it all in, and opened the door.

The rest of the morning passed in a blur of new faces and too-kind smiles. The social worker lady came back, bringing an older, nice-looking police detective in an ordinary business suit.

Satya wouldn't be going to Aunt Glo and Uncle Ray's, she learned. They wouldn't tell her why, but she'd be able to visit them soon. Mrs. Neal would be happy to have her for as long as was needed. They only placed the nicest children with her. Kids who just needed a quiet, safe place to stay, and who weren't in any trouble themselves. There were other foster homes for kids like that.

Satya stared in shock. She'd heard about kids being fostered because they were naughty or had parents who couldn't take care of them, but it had never occurred to her to think of herself in similar terms.

Mom had had some kind of mental breakdown. She was going to be in hospital for a while, maybe a long time, and would need lots of help to get better. Satya could see her when she was ready, but it might be some time.

They already knew about Mommy's up-and-down times, and Daddy's drunk times. They already knew about the broken arm and the concussion from a few months ago.

Eager to explain, she showed them how her arm was just fine now. She explained that he'd sworn he'd be more careful, especially not to hurt her head, because she was supposed to go to college. And he hadn't. He'd spanked her once, and grabbed her shoulder a couple of times when she was bad, but otherwise, he hadn't done anything. And he'd stopped drinking.

"Well, we're going to have a very nice children's doctor check you out, head to toe, just to make sure you're A-okay," said the police detective, trying to be friendly. Satya tried not to roll her eyes, but shrugged. She loathed being poked and prodded, especially by strangers. And she knew they'd try all sorts of tricky ways to ask probing questions about Mom and Dad.

As kind as the detective was, he kept asking those same kinds of questions until the social worker asked him to take it easy, that they had plenty of time later.

All the time in the world.

Because they were so sorry to tell her, but Daddy had died last night. And yes, it had happened while he and Mom were fighting. They weren't sure yet exactly what had happened or in what order.

She sort of knew it all along.

She thought of her mother, her bloody hands and wild eyes.

Just hitting couldn't do _that_, could it? All the blood, all over Mommy, and all up the walls where they fought...

This time, she made it to the bathroom.

* * *

><p><strong><em>The<em>_ System_**

Five very earnest people, some in uniform, some in suits, and one in demure two inch heels, sat among the ruins of sandwiches, french fries, coffee and danish.

Various other people who had requested a seat at the table, representing media as far away as British Columbia and Texas, were not present. Since there was no mystery to be solved, and only the outrage of a nation to be poked into bonfire proportions, the media had been told exactly where they ranked in the investigation.

Besides the natural protective inclinations of law enforcement, there simply wasn't space for any more than one small police-beat reporter's desk in the tiny meeting room at the Tomales Bay Station House. The officers were used to sharing the facility with Park Rangers from Tomales Bay State Park when necessary, but this onrush had knocked them sideways.

"We'll issue a press statement later," Captain Reed assured the reporters gathered outside the station house door. "You'll have it for the late news at eleven."

"That's great for TV and radio, but we have to file by ten, just to make the final City edition," protested the San Francisco Chronicle.

"We know."

The media dispersed. They grumbled about free speech and the public's right to know about a violent offender in the community, but they could not argue with the fact that all the protagonists were either in custody, in foster care, or dead. There was nothing to do all day except interview neighbours of the quiet, hippie couple, and formulate different ways of saying "The small coastal community of Tomales Bay is rocked at this hour..."

After a morning of rather graphic updates on the stabbing investigation, best taken on an empty stomach, the five remaining delegates were grateful for a plain lunch and a break. Dr. Taylor, representing Satya's emotional interests, chuckled into his beard more than once despite the grim circumstances.

"She's a riot, and she doesn't even know." he concluded, putting his notes aside. "Very precocious kid. No sign of age-inappropriate sexual awareness or interference. Definitely a pattern of escalating abuse, increasing in conjunction with the mother's depressive periods and father's drinking binges. She's very defensive of them. Doesn't seem to display any backlash against her mother at the moment, though it hasn't sunk in. Mostly she's frightened for her. My greatest concern is that Satya is _too_calm. She knows intellectually that her mother very likely was the hand that killed her father, but she's far from understanding that it was no simple accident. She speaks of her parents in the present tense, including her father. Mentally, she still lives at home, and will be going back as soon as she's allowed to."

The assembled group shook their heads sadly. "It's going to hit her like a ton of bricks," said the social worker. "She's so attached to the house, and her parents. Very sad. One gets the feeling they could have been great parents if they'd just gotten proper support and medical care."

"Well, if she's lucky, they'll get to visit once a week," said Laura's appointed Legal Aid lawyer, "and only while Mrs. Sidle is stable. That could take some time. Mrs. Sidle is in a bad way. She's been heavily sedated since her arrest. It's looking like either diminished mental capacity-man-one or long-term committal to a psychiatric hospital. Obviously, my preference is for the latter. At this point, nobody on either side is talking murder-one. The autopsy on Mr. Sidle hasn't been completed yet. As you saw, he's, ah, a bit of a puzzle for the ME to put back together first. There may well be mitigating factors found."

Dr. Taylor nodded. "I think it's likely that Laura's mental health team will advocate for Satya to be part of her mother's healing process, as much as the reverse. If it can be a two-way street, I'm all for it, but I have a feeling that Satya has been parenting her parents all along, and it will be a difficult transition for her to learn to be a child again. She won't take to it lightly."

"And the situation with the aunt and uncle, Gloria and Ray Pickering?" asked the detective. "I understand there are concerns."

Officer Hansen nodded self-consciously and paraphrased from his case notes, glad of a chance to redeem himself slightly in the eyes of his captain.

"While kinship care would obviously be the best end-goal, there's concern about the effect of Satya being placed there, especially in such a traumatic time. Gloria is recovering alcoholic herself. Gloria and Mike's - the deceased's - father was a violent alcoholic who abused his children, mostly Gloria. She's done well, but it's only with the support of her husband Ray, and regular therapy that she has been able to live a more or less stable life. She's only able to work sporadically, and she admitted that her husband had to prevent her from going out to find alcohol after they were informed of Mr. Sidle's death. There is no other known family. The Pickerings would require frequent follow-up attention, and as immediate family, they would not be eligible for state foster-parent payments, which they would definitely need, having only one moderate regular income and a twelve year old daughter already."

"And, ah, if I might interject, we don't yet know what financial state the family is in," said the lawyer, "but we anticipate that Mrs. Sidle will have to sell the house and business, and her treatment will no doubt be expensive, with only the bare minimum covered by the state. It's unlikely that Satya will have many financial resources to draw from, except for a bit of a trust fund on majority, perhaps. Certainly no kind of sustenance income to bring with her."

"All she'd have to do is sell her story to some of the hyenas out there and she'd be set for life." grimaced Captain Reed. "I imagine there'll be a few locals eating steak for a while on Mrs. Sidle About Town stories fed to the press."

"Too true." said the social worker. "Which is why we definitely want to put strong protections in place for Satya. My supervisor suggests regular visits with the Pickerings, to be monitored at first – perhaps even overnight visits, in the future, but no live-in arrangement at this time. She's better off staying with Greta, for now. It's a close-knit neighbourhood, and the locals all know not to answer questions about Greta's kids."

"Thank heavens for Greta Neal. Four a.m. delivery didn't even faze her."

Heads nodded around the table.

"For now, at least. Greta's place is ideal for a well-behaved young kid caught in a scrape, but she may need a different situation if behaviour issues do arise in future - which they very well might. And it's a lonely place for a girl who's just lost her parents and has no friends in the area."

"Speaking of which, what about school?"

"No reason she shouldn't go back as usual. It's three weeks away," said Dr. Taylor. "It'll be good for her to have something to focus on. She'll be in Sixth Grade. And I would recommend that she return to her usual school. Satya seems to be well adjusted there. The school counsellor's a retired clinical Child Psychologist. He'll see her as often as necessary. In fact, he's willing to begin seeing her now, before the term begins. He'd be a good transitional contact person for her."

"Good." said the social worker. "I know him. I'll set that up. That's Satya settled for the time being. Now, if you'll excuse us, gentlemen, we'll leave you to your legal wrangling."

Everyone shared congratulatory smiles and handshakes as the social worker and the psychologist got up and left. Such teamwork.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Under the Bell Jar<em>**

Satya tried to explain that both Mom and Dad always said they wanted to be cremated, but since Aunt Glo and Uncle Ray were in charge, there was going to be an Episcopalian service and burial for Daddy. To which Mrs. Neal said only:

"Well, at least it's a Christian service of some kind. Oh, I know they had some very nice Indian friends, dear, but, well, they might not have learned how Americans do some things, would they?"

"I don't know," said Satya. They were having tea at the kitchen table, after Aunt Glo's phone call. "I've never been to a funeral. Or church."

"Never?" asked Mrs. Neal.

Satya shook her head. "They had a Hindu guru. A few, I guess. They come - they used to come visit the house. They all talked about the Patanjali sutras and Krishnamurti's stories - we talked about those after we did the Surya Namashkar. But don't you have to be cremated to be reincarnated? Do you just get stuck where you are, if you're buried?"

She looked up expectantly, hoping for answers.

"Never been to church," Mrs. Neal repeated, mystified.

"I don't mind going, or anything," Satya said hurriedly, "I think it would be interesting."

"Interesting! I should say so," said Mrs. Neal. "Have you got a black skirt or dress with you, dear?"

Satya shook her head. She'd never worn black in her life, and skirts only rarely. "The Ministry lady didn't put my birthday party dress in with my things - but it's blue and white, anyway."

Mrs. Neal placed her teacup in its saucer with a decisive rattle. "Well, then, what better excuse to take you shopping? You'll need some back-to-school clothes, too, so we'll find you a suitable dress for the funeral and for Sunday School while we're out. A party dress wouldn't do. We should introduce you to the Youth Minister before you start, too."

_That's funny,_ thought Satya. _Mommy and the gurus always wore white when they had temple services. Maybe other religions have other colours?_

"So I'll go to church for the funeral, and then I'll keep going to Sunday School, after?" she asked, as if confirming an assignment.

"Well, I'm sure it's the best thing, dear. It's important to have spiritual support, you know, when sad things happen. And it's like having one big family to be with wherever - well, wherever you happen to live. I mean whatever house, whatever family you live with. You can always find a church nearby to go to, and good people you can trust. Especially for girls like you, who miss their parents so much."

Mrs. Neal was trying to warn her of something. Not for the first time, Satya found her frustration mounting. She certainly wasn't going to be stupid about trusting any old grownup just because she missed her parents. And why did it feel like they were trying to stamp out everything that was unique and special about her family?

"You mean it's important for foster kids to go to church?" she asked, point-blank.

"Well, it's certainly suggested," temporized Mrs. Neal. "Spiritual support is important to get over things. There's so many feelings you just can't prepare for, dear. It's good to have both the company and the wisdom of the ages to lean on, when tragedies happen."

_Like Mom killing Dad, even though nobody's saying it..._

I'm supposed to be angry at Mom. I'm supposed to be angry at Dad. But I'm not. Not at them. I'm just...I don't really feel anything yet. I wish they'd all just go away, all these people telling me what I'm supposed to be going through.

It's only been a few days.

And Dad was supposed to be cremated, not buried. Aunt Glo should've known.

When will they let me see Mom? I don't care how sick she is. I know she went mad. They keep saying sick, but it's not that kind of sick. I saw her right after...

She felt the creeping nausea and choking tears rising up, and thought fast of something else instead.

"What size are you, dear - are you in the Junior Misses yet?" asked Mrs. Neal. "So hard to find decent clothes for young girls these days..."

She cast her eyes over Satya, in her favourite old blue jeans and Fleetwood Mac t-shirt.

Satya tried not to look mutinous. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath for her to freak out on them and turn into some damaged, troubled kid, and she wasn't going to give them the satisfaction.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Satya-Sara<em>**

Satya kicked her heels on the legs of her chair in the waiting room. She was supposed to be reading an old _Owl_magazine, but she could hear every word said about her, and she was interested.

"It's like she turned into an angry adult overnight." Aunt Glo said to the child psych. "There's no kid left in her. She won't even answer to her name anymore."

Aunt Glo, at least, had past experiences to compare with Satya's silences and cold, unemotional questions and responses. Everyone else commented on how well-mannered and well-adjusted Satya was, but there was no fooling Gloria, whose survival had depended upon reading her family members' most subtle cues.

Aunt Glo, therefore, had battled her way into the network of those determined to save Satya. From what, Satya knew not, since anyone with any history of harming her was dead or being kept sky-high on sedatives and anti-psychotics. Still, Satya was grateful. Aunt Glo was a formidable advocate. If Aunt Glo couldn't take Satya in, she would damn well keep an eye on anyone who did.

"Well, is it any wonder? Children are resilient. They deal with tragedy by instinct, and sometimes that means disappearing within, somewhere safe. Withdrawal and name-denial...it's quite normal, for now."

"It's just...she was a magical child, not just smart, but funny and sweet, like a kid should be. She was the saving grace of those two. However badly they messed up, they knew they could look at her and see what they'd created. She was all their good hopes."

"It's certainly clear to me that they were very loving and encouraging of her, even with the escalating, er, tensions at home. She'd be a remarkable child with or without the challenges her parents faced."

"You can say the words. Mike was an alcoholic with a violent temper. Laura was manic depressive and paranoid, and they were perpetually broke because they gave everything they had to their friends' Ashram. It wasn't quite a cult, but it might have been. That's the truth. But Laura's still a sister to me. Mike was my brother. I protected him from our father. Now _that_was an abusive man. Believe me, anything Michael did to his family was one percent of what our father doled out. Mike loved his girls more than anything in the world. If he'd...if it was Laura or Satya who died, Mike would've followed them right after. Laura's on suicide watch, did you know?"

"So they tell me. I believe you. But as you know, love and remorse do not provide legal cover. Sooner or later..."

"Sooner or later, Satya would have been removed from the home anyway. I know. I know the signs of parents losing the fight. I wish I could have tried to get custody a year ago. I tried to help them all along, but..."

"Mrs. Pickering, it's easy to look back and think so. But you know that wouldn't have solved or prevented anything, don't you?"

"Of course I know. And there's no way Satya will be allowed to stay with us, not for the long term. I'm an alcoholic, and a child of an alcoholic. I still fight that fight every day. Sometimes I lose. Ironic, really - alcoholic, drug-abusing, child-abusing parents keep their kids with them or trade them back and forth all the time, and nobody cares. But try to reach out through the proper channels, and ask permission to give your own niece a good home, and see how far you get."

Satya, listening avidly, felt her heart sink. That explained why Charlotte had been hurried off the phone the other day, when they were chatting about their possible future as sister-cousins.

It had been the first time in the whole horrible week that Satya, who had shyly enlisted Charlotte as the first person to begin calling her by the less conspicuous and much less painful name of _Sara_, had felt any hope. A settled life, with - as nice as Mrs. Neal was - people who knew her well.

What was there to look forward to now?

* * *

><p><strong><em>School<em>**

"Shh, it's her."

The hush of voices, most of them as familiar to her as her own parents', fell silent as she walked into the classroom. She felt a multiplicity of staring, blinking eyes on her as she went into the cloakroom, and by the time she came out, the whispers had renewed.

"...looks different."

"Are we supposed to say anything, you know...?"

"...she'll crack up too?"

_Figures._she thought.

A temporary reprieve came in the form of Mr. Ellis, who came in just as the early bell rang. He set his briefcase on the desk at the side of the room, and as Satya found an empty seat at one of the shared tables, his eye fell upon her.

"Welcome back, everyone. And welcome to Grade Six. You made it to the top." He paused, and did not say that he hoped everyone had had a good summer. Apparently deciding that the only way to control the distracting elephant in the room was to take a direct approach, he went on: "Satya, we're all so sorry to hear about your parents. It may take some people a little time to know what to say, but you have lots of friends here. I hope...well, I hope we can be a comfort."

Satya gave a watery smile and tried to look busy with her new binder.

Even with a class counseling session, it took three days before anyone spoke to her, and close to a week before they would look her in the eye. She heard the whispering, and even Jamie, the class bad-boy, whose father was known to wallop him, looked stricken at the sight of her. Perhaps Satya's situation drove home the reality of his, because he was the first one to mention it directly.

"That's really fucked up," he said. "Your foster parents okay? I was in care once. It was all right, but not like home. You can make them move you, you know. I can tell you how."

"Yeah - no, it's okay," Satya said, surprised. "Mrs. Neal's really nice. It's just her and me."

"Lucky for you," he said.

It took Satya some years to understand what he might have meant. But she appreciated that he spoke to her at all, and was surprised how friendly he became towards her. Even if he told her all sorts of awful stories about foster care, he did talk to her as if she were just a normal kid.

He knew some other kids in the school who were fosters too. Satya was relieved, in a way, that she hadn't known. If those kids looked and acted so normal that you'd never know they didn't go home to their parents at night, then maybe it wasn't so bad after all.

It was almost funny to realize that she'd just spent her recess getting advice on managing her social worker from a pair of world-wise, tough-talking eight-year-olds, though. But who else in her class, except Jamie, could even begin to understand?

It took another week before she told the class and her teachers that she didn't want to be called Satya anymore. Not ever again. Not even by herself.

"Sara," she insisted, in total defiance of her counsellor's advice. "I'm Sara."

She knew it was only the two main syllables of her full name, Satya Narayan, but the only two people who she wanted to hear that name from were far beyond her reach. (And, she admitted to herself, it was possible she had read _A Little Princess_a few times too many, and taken it to heart.)

Typical of children, after a month or so, it seemed that hardly any of her classmates even remembered she was once called anything else. She felt nothing but relief, even when the counsellor cautioned her that one day, she would want to remember the good times she'd had as Satya.

_No, I won't_, she told herself.

Satya was gone. Locked away. Not even Satya anymore. Just a nameless, voiceless little thing with nothing of any importance to say.

It was as simple as that.

* * *

><p><strong>System Kids<strong>

The sleek blue Tempo cruised to a stop outside a small two-storey house with pale blue siding and white trim in need of a powerwash. Three teenagers sat on the front steps and watched.

"New girl's here." said Trevor, handing Jane back her smoke.

"Oh, God. Look at her," Luce gaped, "Check out the blouse. One of Greta's good girls. She looks like a rich bitch."

"Shut up." said Jane. "How's she supposed to look? Like you, you little slut? Oh, hey, did you guys you know she's the one whose mom went psycho and killed her dad, last summer? At that hotel."

"Who'd you get that from?" asked Luce, unoffended.

"Momma Jo, talking to the social worker. She's only twelve, they said. And they're putting her in with us." Jane rolled her eyes.

"Supposed to be a good influence?" Trevor snickered, "Or maybe she'll go all psycho-child and kill us all in our sleep. They'd never have to spend another tax dollar on us."

Luce shook her short tawny curls. "I heard Greta got really sick, and she had to leave there."

"Who from?" Jane demanded. Luce smiled serenely, and Jane groaned. "You believe everything that dickwad tells you?"

"He knows lots. He's _seventeen_. He heard one of the social workers say Greta got sick, and this kid was looking after both of them until they couldn't cover it up anymore. So Greta finally had to go to hospital, and Momma Jo had the only space left anywhere near the school this kid goes to. She's supposed to be some genius."

Jane looked at the small figure with interest. "Really. Huh."

Into this welcoming fray walked Sara, clutching her mother's suitcase in one hand, and the straps of her school backpack in the other. She was acutely aware of how ridiculous she looked, in her church choir outfit of blue skirt and white ruffled blouse. Dressing up had seemed appropriate for meeting a new foster family, but seeing the group on the stairs made her stomach plummet.

There was a boy of about sixteen in carefully ripped, safety-pinned jeans, a 1980 Stones tour t-shirt and checkered Converse, who was watching her from underneath a shock of dyed black hair. A blonde girl, somewhat younger, had long, rooster-combed hair, frosted eyeshadow and lipstick, and a neon green tank top peeking out from under a black off-the-shoulder t-shirt. Her jeans were so tight she must have needed to lie down to do them up, and Sara couldn't imagine how she got out of them. Finally, the most aggressively sexy thirteen-year-old Sara had ever seen, a Shirley Temple ringer, wore a pale pink cotton camisole top with jean shorts rolled up high over perfectly tanned legs. Along with these she wore a double armload of multicoloured sparkly jelly bracelets and blue jelly sandals. She examined her candy-pink fingernails, as Satya came up the path.

_For real?_ thought Sara. _Am I going to get beat up or something?_

She paused in her approach, putting down her bags. The social worker was still digging something out of the trunk, so Sara took a breath to quell the panic and launched right in.

"Hey." she said.

"Hey." said Jane. She took a drag of her smoke and looked Sara up and down like a show pony. "We were expecting you. That's Trevor. He pulled a knife on his mom's boyfriend, who's a junkie louse anyway. That's Luce. She's amateur jailbait at the moment, but we have bets she'll turn pro real soon. I'm Jane. I'm an angel. Who're you, and what are you in for?"

Sara returned the looks full-on.

"I'm Sara," she heard herself say. "I'm only here 'cause my parents were fucked up."

Jane didn't pause at this talk coming from the neatly-groomed child. "So you're just fucked-up-waiting-to-happen. You're new, so I'll tell you now: just 'cause you aren't a juvie doesn't make you any better than anyone else around here. Share whatever you got, and don't talk shit about Momma Jo and Henry. They're tough, but they're totally fair." She ground out her cigarette on the wrought-iron stair rail and stood up. "This isn't Greta's house. Welcome to the system...Sara."

She held out her hand, not unkindly.

Sara shook it.


End file.
